audience

The listeners at a speech or performance, or the intended readership for a piece of writing.

See also:

• Audience Analysis Checklist
• Adaptation
• Audience Analysis
• Focusing
• How to Write for an International Audience
• Implied Audience
• Listening
• New Rhetoric
• "The Patron and the Crocus" by Virginia Woolf
• Public Speaking
• Purpose
• Reader
• Receiver
• Rhetorical Situation
• Rhetorical Stance
• Second Persona

Etymology:

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)



• "The meanings of 'audience' . . . tend to diverge in two general directions: one toward actual people external to a text, the audience whom the writer must accommodate; the other toward the text itself and the audience implied there, a set of suggested or evoked attitudes, interests, reactions, [and] conditions of knowledge which may or may not fit with the qualities of actual readers or listeners."
  (Douglas B. Park, "The Meaning of 'Audience.'" College English, 44, 1982)



• "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?
  (X.J. Kennedy, et al., The Bedford Reader. 1997)



• "Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn't exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person--a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one."
  (John Steinbeck, interviewed by Nathaniel Benchley. The Paris Review, Fall 1969)



• "We can distinguish five types of address in the process of hierarchical appeals. These are determined, as befits a rhetoric based on sociology, by the kinds of audiences we must court. First, there is the general public ('They'); second, there are community guardians ('We'); third, others significant to us as friends and confidants with whom we talk intimately ('You' which internalized becomes 'Me'); fourth, the self we address inwardly in soliloquy (the 'I' talking to its 'me'); and fifth, ideal audiences whom we address as ultimate sources of social order."
  (Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Communication and Social Order. Oxford Univ. Press, 1968)



• "Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. . . . [R]elevant 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, The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking)