Written by Desiree Thorpe
When writing an assignment, it is easy to think that your audience is your professor, but that is not the case. In most assignments given, you will have to choose who your audience is. While it’s always best to check with your professors, it’s really important to understand that audience shapes how you write: it sets up your tone, purpose, and context.
The purpose of your English class is to help you become an agile writer that can write in different situations and contexts, so if you keep imagining your audience as your professor, it might be difficult to transfer that knowledge to new, real-world writing situations. However, it’s hard to not think of your professor as your audience especially since you’re turning in your paper for a grade!
But when you write for your professor, you can either 1) not include enough information for the audience or 2) use too much jargon from your class that your audience may not be familiar with. Choosing an audience might feel weird. It may be something that you never thought of. A couple of theorists who explain ways to address an audience might be the help you need.
Many theorists have different perspectives on the topic—one is Walter Ong who states that the audience is fiction. What he means is that you make up your audience and when you do that, you often create values and needs for an imagined audience.
An example Ong gives is that sometimes when you write a letter—or text message—, you are already imaging the person you are writing to and how they would react to what you say. The point is that imagining an audience can help your writing! However, if you imagine your professor as your audience, you might only be envisioning how they will grade and how you have shown your mastery of the genre—and while that is a reasonable thought, to truly master a genre, you need to have a real audience in mind.
Another theorist is Peter Elbow! He explains that it is better to not have an audience in mind so that you can express your ideas in your first draft (Clark 111). But, this is only a first step because what tends to happen in a first draft, without an audience, is egocentric writing—writing for yourself.
That is, the first draft might be writer-based prose and not reader-based prose. Writer-based prose usually “omits contextual information or elaboration that an audience would need or includes information that an audience would not be able to understand without further explanation” (Clark 111). The next step after drafting without an audience is to revise and shape your writing to be reader-based prose—meaning, you add more information that the audience needs to know.
The next time you write a paper, try imagining an audience that isn’t your professor! Or, if you like to get your ideas on paper first, you can write for yourself and then imagine an audience as you revise.
References
Clark, Irene. Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in The Teaching of Writing. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2012.
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