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Morgan Healey

ENC 2135

Project 1

Audience is any group of people that consume a type of media. The author may have a

certain audience in mind, or the audience may be a small group of people within the full group

that consumes the media. On the surface, the concept of audience seems extremely simple. But

when you analyze it further, you discover that this concept can be complex. Looking through the

lens of audience, one can notice ties to the genre and purpose that create an ever flowing web in

literature, where each one effects and is effected by the others. Many pieces of rhetoric create

more than one audience due to their genre, and others have genres that create the audiences. Both

of these concepts also have a direct relationship with rhetorical situation.

In How to Tame a Wild Tongue, the author discusses the link between her language and

her culture. She has two intended audiences in mind; the chicanos who will identify with her

point and everyone else who she hopes will see the struggles of her people - "So, if you want to

really hurt me, talk badly about my identity I am my language (39). In order to connect to the

audiences, she slips in and out of different dialects of Spanish and discusses the hardships that

came with her culture - muchachas bien criadas, well-bred girls don't answer back. Es una falta

de respito to talk back to ones mother or father (34). The first audience responds to this because

they can relate. Theyve heard those words in their households or communities, and theyve felt

the same pain as the author. The same tactics get through to the second audience because it feels

foreign to them. They cant fully understand the pain that people in a different community from

them feel, but they can see their point of view enough to have empathy for people who have
gone through the same oppression as the author. By looking at the audiences of this piece, we

can also see many different possible author's purposes. The purpose could be to show strength in

a community if you think about the first audience, and it could be to inform about those struggles

if you think about the second audience. By looking at audience, you can also see its connection

to genre. One audience might put this piece in the genre of memoir, while others might read it as

an educational book and put it in a separate genre for that. This ties into rhetorical situation

because the exigence may seem different for the different audiences. The first audience may

believe that the exigence that created the rhetorical situation was that others needed to hear about

the struggles they faced, while the second audience may not feel the same way.

Youre Not Going to Believe What Im About to Tell You is a webcomic on a website

called The Oatmeal which focuses on clever and insightful comics in a cute cartoony style. This

particular comic talks about the fact that people are more willing to believe things when they

dont go against their core beliefs. For example, the piece states that more people are willing to

believe that George Washingtons teeth were made out of different animals teeth than the teeth

of slaves because most people believe that George Washington was a good person, and they

dont want this core belief changed. This comic creates its own audience simply due to its

medium because more people are likely to read a cute comic about two birds talking than a

source-based article, even if the content is the same. That means that this piece might have

reached an audience that may not have found similar information in another source. It also

throws in ample wit to attract people: for example, it says if you were a caveman and another

caveman threw a boulder at your head, you wouldnt react by logically debating the pros and

cons of getting brained. Not only is this witty, it appeals to the readers logos by showing them
why they might think the way they do. Another interesting thing this piece does with audience is

that it tries to guess what the audience is thinking. This can effect the effectiveness of the piece

because you're more likely to believe what the author is saying if he accurately predicts your

thoughts than if he does not. If you didnt get angry when he mentioned that Washingtons teeth

were made of slaves, or if you already know that Jesus Christ wasnt actually born on December

25th, then your reaction will not be accurately predicted. This means that different audiences will

have different perspectives on the legitimacy of the piece due to their own beliefs, which creates

two audiences in itself: an audience that aligns with the predictions of the author and one that

doesnt. This connects to genre because a comic is in a separate genre from a normal article that

might have the same content, and so the genre effects the audience.

On Slowing Down is a commencement address given by Billy Collins, the current Poet

Laureate of the United States, to the graduates of Choate Rosemary Hall in the spring of 2003. In

it, he talks about how they need to take time to appreciate the things around them and not speed

through their lives. He also asks them to have gratitude for what they have, and the opportunities

that theyd been granted. Much like the other pieces, this piece can create more than one

audience. The first audience is the group of students that heard the speech at the actual

commencement, and the second audience is everyone else who has consumed this piece, either

through hearing it or reading it online. These audiences can interpret the piece differently. The

emotional state of the first audience and the way that they receive the speech might alter their

perception of how accurate it is. They may believe that its extremely relatable and original just

because it was at their ceremony, and because they are called out personally: some of your time

here at Choate was spent in a swift current of information They may not be in the correct
mental state to analyze the legitimacy of what hes saying. An outside audience who didn't attend

the ceremony has no emotional attachment to it, so they can interpret it without any bias. They

may feel that Collins is being too emotional or not agree with him on certain points that the

original audience may have missed due to the attachment to the ceremony. For example, this

second audience may not agree with his points on memorization and its importance. Audience

connects to genre in this piece because a spoken speech is a different genre than a written speech,

and which audience you are in determines that genre for you.

In the book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says about You, Sam Gosling talks about how

everything in your life can be interpreted to have an audience, even your bedroom or the outside

of your door. He talks about how you can tell a lot about someone that you may not know based

on their possessions or the things they put on display. This piece gives a really interesting

perspective on audience because it takes it away from the standard definition of people

consuming media and turns it into everyone around us. We all have an audience, and it might be

the people around us. For example, all of the people who walk by your dorm room would be the

audience of whatever decorations you put on it, and anyone that wanders into your room would

be the audience of that. But it opens itself up to some questions. Can we really consider

everything around us as a composition? Does everything we do or create have exigence? Some

people might agree with Goslings point about audience, but others might feel like it escapes the

realm of composition too far. This piece also puts a unique spin on the rest of the rhetorical

concepts, such as genre. It can be interpreted that Gosling believes that everything in our lives is

in its own genre and can be treated as such, with a purpose and an audience. Rhetorical situation

also relates because some might argue that not everything in our lives is a rhetorical situation that
has exigence. If not everything in our lives is a rhetorical situation, and not everything in our life

is a composition, then the definition of audience as interpreted by Gosling is incorrect.

We can see the complexity of rhetoric by putting it through the lens of audience. Most of

these sources create their own separate audiences, and have more than one audience that will

interpret the data in the pieces differently. Audience is also interconnected with genre and

rhetorical situation. Audience can effect the genre by the way they interpret a piece, and genre

can effect audience because certain genres will attract certain audiences. Rhetorical situation

effects audience because exigence creates a rhetorical situation in which the resulting

composition should draw an audience that does something in response to the rhetoric. Audience

effects rhetorical situation by creating their own rhetorical situations after reading a composition

in response to the exigence. Seemingly simple concepts can create deep and meaningful

questions when you use them to analyze more difficult compositions, even if those compositions

are just objects in the world around us. This truly show the importance of these concepts and

how they can be applied to every type of composition, and how we use them whether we know it

or not.

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