Definition:
The readers or listeners imagined by a writer or speaker before and during the composition of a text.
According to Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca in Rhetorique et Philosophie (1952), the writer predicts this audience's probable response to--and understanding of--a text.
Related to the concept of implied audience is the second persona.
See also:
- Audience
- Audience Analysis
- Audience Analysis Checklist
- Adaptation
- Essay
- Implied Author
- New Rhetoric
- Persona
- Reading
Examples and Observations:
- "The author makes his readers, just as he makes his characters."
(Henry James) - "Just as the speaker need not be, and usually is not, identical with the author, so the implied audience is an element of the poem itself and does not necessarily coincide with a given chance reader."
(Rebecca Price Parkin, "Alexander Pope's Use of the Implied Dramatic Speaker." College English, 1949) - "Just as we distinguish between a real rhetor and rhetorical persona, we also can distinguish between between a real audience and an 'implied audience.' The 'implied audience' (like the rhetorical persona) is fictive because it is created by the text and exists only inside the symbolic world of the text."
(Ann M. Gill and Karen Whedbee, "Rhetoric." Discourse as Structure and Process, ed. by Teun A. van Dijk. Sage, 1997) - "[T]exts not only address concrete, historically situated audiences; they sometimes issue invitations or solicitations for auditors and/or readers to adopt a certain perspective for reading or listening. . . . Jasinksi (1992) described how The Federalist Papers constructed a vision of an impartial and 'candid' audience that contained specific prescriptions for how the 'real' audience should evaluate the arguments being addressed during the constitutional ratification debate."
(James Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric. Sage, 2001) - "Every reading of an argument yields an implied audience, and by this I mean the audience on whom the claim is understood to be made and in terms of which the argumentation is supposed to develop. In a charitable reading, this implied audience is also the audience for whom the argument is persuasive, the audience which allows itself to be influenced by reasoning."
(James Crosswhite, The Rhetoric of Reason: Writing and the Attractions of Argument. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1996) - Real and Implied Readers
"In Wayne Booth's terms, the 'implied author' of a text is the creator of an 'implied reader.' But one does not need to agree with Booth's conclusion that 'the most successful reading is the one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement' (Rhetoric of Fiction). On the contrary, the pleasure of the text may arise from the reader's refusal to play the role sketched out by the implied author. Viewed in this way, the rhetorical drama of the essay resides in the conflict between the conceptions of self and world that the reader brings to a text and the conceptions that the persona attempts to arouse."
(Richard Nordquist, "Voices of the Modern Essay." University of Georgia, 1991)
Also Known As: textual audience, implied reader, fictional audience, implied auditor
