Definition:
The listeners at a performance or the intended readership for a piece of writing. See also:
- Audience Analysis
- Implied Audience
- Rhetorical Situation
- "The Patron and the Crocus" by Virginia Woolf
Etymology:
From the Latin, "hear"Examples and Observations:
- "Your readers, those people you are trying to reach with your writing, constitute your audience. The relationship between your audience's needs--based on its knowledge and level of expertise--and your own selection and presentation of evidence is important. Much of what you say and how you say it depends on whether your audience is a group of experts or a more general audience consisting of diverse people interested in your topic.
"Even the way you organize your writing and the amount of details you include (the terms you define, the amount of context you provide, the level of your explanations) depends in part on what your audience needs to know."
(R. DiYanni and P. C. Hoy II, Scribner's Handbook for Writers. Allyn, 2001) - "Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."
(Henry David Thoreau) - "You can increase your awareness of your audience by asking yourself a few questions before you begin to write.
- Who are to be your readers?
- What is their age level? background? education?
- Where do they live?
- What are their beliefs and attitudes?
- What interests them?
- What, if anything, sets them apart from other people?
- How familiar are they with your subject?
- "Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience."
(Dale Carnegie)
Also Known As: listeners, readers
