Muniz 1

Matt Muniz
Kmiecik
ENGL 361
10/12/2014
Who do Students Write for?
The audience of a work is a component of writing that is often overlooked. A lot of
students tend to target their teachers or instructors as the primary audience of a paper or other
literary work. But, who really is the audience of a students writing? There is an empty phrase,
consider your audience, that is used to remind students to make sure they keep in mind the
people they are writing to. This is a phrase that seems so simple, yet it is something that is so
vague that we really do not know who we should be writing to. Figuring this step out can be
made somewhat simpler though if rhetoric is understood by a writer and if it used properly and if
there is a true understanding of what the audience really is.
The first step of figuring out who a students audience is for a certain writing is to have a
good grasp on what the word audience really means when it comes to composition. Douglass
B. Park says:
Only sometimes does considering audience mean directly considering particular
people; more often it means something much hazier. Writers can attend to a
number of different kinds of issues when they think about audience. (The
Writing Teachers Source Book 311)
So in essence the audience has many different meanings when it comes to writing. In one
hand, and audience can be the people someone is directing their writing to, while in the other the
audience could be different external entity or even something within the text itself. By writing to

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a specific audience, a students paper is going to focus on key aspects that make the paper
interesting to these people. We often see writers adjusting to audiences or accommodating
them (The Writing Teachers Sourcebook311), but we also see writers trying to invoke or aim
certain points, or aspects of the paper to certain people. These are two ways that the audience is
different when it comes to writing, showing how there are different meanings when it comes to
who the audience of a work could potentially be. In the article written by Lisa Ede and Andrea
Lunsford we can see what these two meanings are and how they come into play with writing.
Thinking of an audience as addressed see their audience as real and they emphasize the
concrete reality of their audience (The Writing Teachers Sourcebook 321). Although
addressing an audience is something that student writer directly does, it is similar to how Park
sees writers as adjusting and accommodating with the people they are writing to. When students
write to a concrete physical audience, they seem to adjust their writing to accommodate how
their audience feels about the subject matter of the writing. These things seem to go hand in hand
with one another. Also, this gives more meaning to a different way a students audience can be
seen. This is the most physical form of the audience, and is seen most when it comes to student
writing (student to teacher writing assignments). Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford also show how
they feel writers are similar to Park by showing an audience as invoked by writers as well. Ede
and Lunsford say that writers who envision an audience as invoked stress that the audience of a
written discourse is a construction of the writer, a created fiction (The Writing Teachers
Sourcebook 325). This simply implies that writers who want to invoke a certain group of people,
see themselves as the writer that created this group of interested people themselves. By doing so,
the student writer seems to persuade an audience into liking something about the writing or to

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persuade the audience into liking or disliking the subject matter. When the writing takes this
form, the use of rhetoric is prominent.
Using rhetoric ties seeing an audience as invoked and writing in order to invoke or push
an idea on a certain group together. Wayne C. Booth ties these audience types together with
rhetoric. Booth says, Rhetoric is the art of finding and employing the most effective means of
persuasion on any subject, considered independently of intellectual mastery of that subject
(Teaching Composition 165). So by using rhetoric, a writer is usually trying to push the
audience to something in the subject matter, completely spate from having any knowledge of the
subject to even start with. The writer can even play different roles within these persuasive
writings using different stances, which in the end change who the writer intends the audience to
be. This only furthers the idea of how the audience can be many different things. The rhetorical
stance is a balance of the audience, subject matter and the writer themselves. This is likely the
typical persuasive essay. Another stance is, the pedants stance. This stance is more focused on
the subject matter of the paper. This goes along with what Park said about how the audience can
even be something that is within a paper itself, not just a reader. Next is the, advertisers stance.
This stance shows emphasis on the audience itself. So, this stance targets certain groups of
people in order to persuade them towards something, no matter who they are. Finally, there is the
entertainers stance, where the focus is on the writer themselves. This writing could be a
persuasive essay having to do with the writer, so in this case the audience is the writer. These
stances help give more insight on the never ending possibilities for who or what the audience is.
Even though these articles expressed the audience in their own ways, all share a common theme
in what the overall view of the audience is.

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Writers tend to overlook the audience who they are writing for. This leads to them
targeting their teachers most of the time. Students are told to consider your audience, without
even knowing who their audience is. By helping students grasp that the audience has no true
specific meaning it can open their eyes to who they should be writing to, and also show them that
rhetoric plays a key role in making an audience as well.

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Works Cited
Corbett , Edward P.J., Nancy Myers , and Gary Tate. The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook. 4th
Edition . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.
Johnson, T. R. Teaching Composition: Background Readings. 3rd ed. New York, NY:
Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. Print.