Park, Douglas P. “The Meanings of Audience.” In The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook. 233-242.
Park argues that the concept of an audience is complex and asks for students to understand more than who they’re planning to “write to”: they must have an understanding of the context of the piece, see themselves both as writing to and constructing an audience, and have a conception of discourse conventions and genre. Park uses the same binary that Lunsford and Ede base their essay on (an audience addressed (real people) and an audience invoked (one created by the writer who’s anticipating reader expectations.) When teaching writing, then, instructors need to see audience as a metaphor of sorts and focus on the concerns of context and convention as an intregal part of helping their students write meaningful, appropriate pieces.
Quotable Quotes
“The truth is that we demand from students – often without making it clear to them or to ourselves – a considerable rhetorical virtuosity in dealing with and inventing audience contexts” (241).
Understanding audience stems from “a clear understanding of the kinds of discourse to be served and their purpose in society” (242).
“‘Audience’ is a rough way of pointing at that whole set of contexts” (237)
“Powerful the idea of audience is, it may block thought to the extent that it presents as unified, single, locatable, something that, in fact, involves many different contexts dispersed through a text” (237).
Notable Notes
teachers need to be aware of the multiple meanings of the term “audience”
doesn’t use the term genre, but the discussion around context and conventions points to it.
Revolution Lullabye 