Audience: An Introduction to Research

Abstract

This essay surveys research on the role of audience in discourse in a series of related disciplines, including cognitive psychology, composition, speech communication, rhetoric, and philosophy.' As a bibliographic review it is introductory and exploratory, rather than exhaustive or definitive. I have not been able to cite all relevant research in the fields covered; space limitations required, for example, that I delete an earlier section on experimental studies of audience manipulation and response in speech communication. Nor have I covered all potentially relevant fields. (Two obvious omissions are psycholinguistics and reader-response theory.) Moreover, given the preliminary nature of many of these studies, my evaluations can only be tentative. There is one conclusion which can, however, clearly be stated at the outset: composition teachers can achieve a sophisticated, complex understanding of the nature and role of audience in written discourse only if they are aware of both empirical and theoretical research in their own and other disciplines. Thus this review confirms, once again, that composition is inherently an interdisciplinary enterprise.

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