Writing for Readers: Three Perspectives on Audience

Abstract

From Aristotle's Rhetoric to the latest composition textbook, we can find broad agreement that the writer's consideration of his (or her) exerts an important influence on written communication. Such consensus might lead one to conclude that composition theorists share a unified view of audience, a view inherited from the classical rhetoricians and modified in only minor ways by subsequent studies of rhetoric and communication. A decade or more ago, there may have been such a unified view, and composition teachers may have once been in substantial agreement about what it meant to teach However, it is becoming clear that the term audience has multiple meanings in contemporary work on composition: the term no longer means the same thing to all theorists who talk about the process of writing for readers, and various pedagogical techniques-all purportedly aimed at teaching students about audience-are based on quite different theoretical perspectives.' My aim in this essay is to examine three views of which are currently influential in our field. I will call these the rhetorical, the informational, and the social perspectives. My method of examining each perspective will be four-fold: to offer a brief account of its conception of audience, to examine some of the theoretical assumptions underlying this view, to illustrate the perspective's pedagogical implications, and to propose some objections and limitations to each view. Thus my goal is to present a survey of three current perspectives on audience, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of each but without arguing for the superiority of one view. I hope, in other words, to provide a conceptual framework that will clarify some of the things composition theorists can mean when they talk about the writer's audience.

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