It's not rare for a teacher to ask students about a text they are reading: Who's the audience here?
By "text," I don't just mean writing, though of course things like novels, poems, articles, essays, and textbooks are at the front of my mind. A text can also be audio or video, like a film, a podcast, a commercial, a speech, etc.
People who communicate always have audience in mind: a person, people, or groups of people whom they hope to entertain, to inform, or to persuade with their text. Knowing who the audience is for a particular text can help you understand the choices an author made in composing the text, and it can form the basis of an analysis of how successful a text is at reaching that audience.
So then, how do you actually figure out who the audience is? And how can you describe that audience in useful, specific ways? That's exactly what this article will cover.
What Is an Audience?
An audience is a person or group of people—often defined by similar traits, desires, or concerns—who are intended° recipients of a message. For our purposes, we'll focus on two main types:
- The primary audience of a text is the one that was forefront in the writer's mind as they created a text, the one they most directly want to reach or serve. For a persuasive text, this audience is usually the decision-makers, those who can implement or put into practice the thing the text hopes to persuade them to do.
- Secondary audiences are all the other groups that might have an interest or stake in the text but who aren't the main intended audience.
Let's make one thing clear: There is almost always more than one audience for any public-facing text. Sure, a love letter likely has an audience of just one person, and a memo sent from the boss of a very small company to their six employees can maybe claim just those six people as the audience.
But if we're talking about a book, a newspaper editorial, a commercial, a documentary film, or some other text that will have a wide distribution, there will be multiple audiences involved. Even the boss's memo from the previous paragraph could have multiple audiences—the six employees may be the primary audience, but there may be an company owner who keeps an eye on what the boss does and who is therefore a secondary audience. Or say the memo becomes evidence in some kind of legal dispute between the boss and employees—now lawyers and judges become another secondary audience.°
If a teacher or assignment asks you to identify the audience of a text, you can safely assume they mean the primary audience (but that doesn't mean there aren't others). If they ask you to identify an audience or one audience, they might be open to primary or various secondary audiences (it never hurts to ask for clarification).
In the rest of this article I'll say "the" audience just to keep things simple and consistent, but I don't ever mean that there is only one audience for any particular text.
How Do We Know Who the Audience Is?
A text rarely comes right out and says who its primary and secondary audiences are. Instead, you have to look for clues and practice some deductive reasoning to determine who a text is targeting.
There are two main places to look for clues: outside and inside the text.
Outside the Text
The first place to look for clues about who the audience is to consider the details of its publication and distribution.
For example, if I want to reach the citizens of Chicago, I probably won't publish an editorial in the Los Angeles Times. Similarly, if my intended audience is my coworkers, I probably won't put it in a social media post on my personal account.
In other words, the place where a text is published or its means of distribution offer clear clues—if not about who the audience is, certainly about who the audience is not.
For anything published in a mass media periodical (think newspapers, magazines, and the like, both in print and online) you can further get clues by considering a publication's typical readership. As an example, let's consider The Atlantic.
The Atlantic is a long-running American magazine that publishes editorial content (analysis, opinion, and criticism—not basic reporting) about current events in politics, economics, culture, etc. So its audience is likely to include people (mostly Americans) who are interested and engaged in those topics and that sort of discourse. Those readers are likely well educated (at least high school level and likely above), as evidenced by the sometimes challenging reading level of the magazine and the depth and breadth of the topics addressed. While the magazine's politics lean to the left (i.e., the liberal side of the political spectrum), its reputation means people of most political stripes consider it a valuable source of public thought. Lastly, The Atlantic operates on a subscription model, so readers likely have enough interest to devote some of their disposable income to purchasing access.
So if we are trying to determine the audience of an article published in The Atlantic, we can therefore deduce a sort of outer boundary of its readership: well-educated, civically and culturally engaged Americans.
Inside the Text
Clues from outside the text usually won't allow you to identify the audience with enough specificity. For that, we have to look inside the text itself.
Once you've identified the main claim or thesis of the text,° figuring out the audience is as simple as figuring out who that thesis is meant for. For an informative text, ask yourself who the writer is trying to give this information to. For a persuasive text, ask yourself who the writer is trying to convince.
Speaking of persuasive texts, when the thesis is some kind of call to action, the primary audience is almost always going to be whatever people can perform that action or cause it to be performed. For example, if a text is calling for a new law to be passed, the audience is probably lawmakers and, by extension, the constituents who elect and influence those lawmakers.
Take care, however. If you only have a vague idea of what the thesis is, you might mistake who the audience is. For example, imagine a text for which you think the thesis is something along the lines of "students shouldn't be allowed to have smartphones in school." Lots of groups can potentially enact that thesis in lots of different ways:
- Students could voluntarily put their phones away
- Parents could promote more discipline or limit their kids' access
- Teachers could adopt and enforce classroom policies banning phones
- Districts could do the same thing but at a higher level
- State governments could even get involved somehow
It might pay, in this case, to reexamine the text closely (especially the conclusion, where the writer is likely to sum up and restate their thesis and main points) to see if you get a more specific idea about the thesis and, by extension, a better idea of the intended audience.
Here are a few other things to look out for, clues about who the audience might include:
- Who are the stakeholders? While the primary audience may be able to enact the thesis, any group with a stake in the issue is likely to be a secondary audience of some kind. So ask yourself who cares about the issue or has something to gain or lose by it.
- Consider the evidence. Different audiences will find different types of evidence convincing, so paying attention to what outside sources a writer cites will also be a clue about who they hope to reach.
- Look for jargon and slang. Writers tend to use language that their intended audience will understand and appreciate, so the use of technical terminology or slang could signal who the audience is. Similarly, considering the formality of the language and its general tone can also be an indicator.
- How does the author build credibility? Writers want to come across as trustworthy with their intended audience, so they might say things about themselves in order to establish their ethos vis-a-vis that audience. Phrases like "As a high school teacher with 20 years' experience" or "As a parent myself" are clear clues about who the intended audience might be.
Defining and Describing an Audience
Once you have an idea of who the audience might be, the next step is often to build a profile of that audience—to define and describe its makeup in a clear and detailed way. This section offers tips on doing just that, focusing on the audience's traits and their position on the issue.
By Their Traits
The most common way to define who an audience is involves describing the traits that they collectively exhibit. This typically means considering the various demographic categories that might be relevant to a particular audience.
Here is a list of common demographic categories that are often useful in defining an audience by their traits:
- Age
- Gender
- Sexual Orientation
- Ethnicity, Race, Nationality°
- Language Use
- Geographic Location
- Education Level
- Employment Status
- Economic Status
- Marital/Family Status
- Religion
- Political Affiliation
- Health Status
Not all of these categories will be relevant each time you define an audience—typically only a few will be important. For example, with a television show like Sesame Street, the categories of age and education level are useful in defining an audience of pre-school aged children. We might further specify, for the American version of the show at least, that the audience mostly consists of pre-school aged children living in the US and who speak or are learning English and/or Spanish.
So, for Sesame Street, the demographic categories of age, education level, geographic location, and languages are useful, while other categories such as religion, political affiliation, and gender don't really apply.
Additional Traits
While these broad demographic categories are often useful, you may have to get more specific to adequately describe an audience's relevant traits when a text is targeting a more specific group. For example, health status is a very broad category that can include a lot of specifics, and it isn't hard to imagine a text targeted to people "at risk of osteoporosis" or "who suffer from lactose intolerance" or "who snore."
Other more specific traits might revolve around common interests, ambitions, or life choices. Here are some examples:
- pet owners
- people interested in sailing
- alcohol consumers
- expatriates, immigrants, emigrants
- Billy Joel fans
- Netflix subscribers
Corporate Audiences
Lastly, keep in mind that the audience may not be exactly human. For example, a text could be trying to convince "tech companies," "Ivy League universities," "the National Rifle Association," or even "Washington." These audiences aren't, strictly speaking, people—they are "corporate," meaning they are entities (or groups of entities) that are often treated (legally or otherwise) as if they are individuals with decision-making powers, desires, and influence.°
The standard demographic categories don't usually apply to a corporate audiences, but they still act like people (and contain and are run by people) and can therefore be described in similar ways as other audiences. For example, a university doesn't have an ethnicity or gender, but it is guided by a mission, follows a set of guiding principles, and is subject to various laws. It may not be profit-seeking, but it still wants to maintain its reputation and influence in its community.
By Their Position on the Issue
Another way to define an audience is by identifying their position on the issue brought up by the text in question. What we're talking about here is how the audience likely feels about a text's main claim or thesis. They may be
- Favorable to the claim, and therefore won't need a lot of convincing to accept it
- Neutral in their feeling toward the claim, maybe because the issue is unfamiliar to them or isn't particularly controversial, or maybe because the audience has reason to be open-minded about it
- Hostile to the claim, and therefore difficult to convince or even to make listen to the argument
To be clear, we aren't talking about what we think the audience's position will be after reading the arguments laid out in the text. We mean the position they have at the moment of first encountering the argument.
It might help to imagine the audience all sitting in a room, and the author of the text walks in and announces their thesis. How is the audience likely to react to the possibility of listening to and being convinced by the argument to follow? Are they already generally in favor of the sort of thing being argued? Is it a completely new idea but one they would be open to considering? Or have they already mostly made up their minds in opposition to it?
Let's look at an example. Imagine all the residents of a small but diverse town have gathered in the local high school gym, and the mayor stands up and announces, "I'm proposing a new special tax on toilet paper." At this point, he hasn't provided any details about the tax—how high it will be, what the revenue will be used for, the reasons for a tax on this good rather than some other thing. How do you think the audience will respond? Are they favorable, neutral, or hostile to this issue?
The answer likely depends on the traits that this audience, or subsets of the audience, has. For example:
- Political Ideology: Those in the room whose politics tend to oppose taxation will, as a result, be hostile to the very idea of introducing a new tax, regardless of its purpose. Others might be open to (or at least not oppose in principle) a new tax, provided it is justified.
- Family Status: Those who tend to buy a lot of toilet paper, such as parents of large families, may be immediately shocked at the thought of this potential tax unfairly targeting their lives.
- Employment Status: Similar to parents, those in the audience who own or run businesses or organizations that consume a lot of toilet paper (hotels, schools) may oppose the idea as a threat to their employment.
- Wealth: Those at the bottom of the economic ladder may have reservations about a new burden to their wallets, while those on higher rungs may not feel immediately worried and are therefore more open to the idea.
Notice that no subset of the audience is likely to be highly favorable to a new tax—it's hard to imagine any group that is enthusiastically in favor of more government involvement in their lives and a greater financial burden.° Open-mindedness and neutrality maybe, but virtually all segments of the audience will need some convincing before signing on for this plan.
Beware Taking an Average
You may be tempted, when defining an audience by their position, to take an average of the various positions you can imagine. For example, with the above audience, you could say that, on average, the townsfolk are "neutral to hostile" or "somewhere between neutral and hostile" to the claim. However, taking an average isn't always a good idea because it glosses over the details and erases the specific reasons why various parts of the audience feel the way they do.
Instead of averaging, therefore, consider these two alternatives (keeping in mind your purposes or the requirements of the assignment you are working on). First, you could provide the additional detail and explanation needed to reveal what's going on behind the average, as in this example:
The audience of the mayor's announcement is likely to be, for a variety of reasons, somewhere between neutral and hostile. Those with a specific political aversion to taxes or an economic reason to oppose a new financial burden—such as poorer members of the community, parents of large families, or those who work in toilet paper-purchasing businesses and organizations—will probably be more hostile to the claim. Even those members of the community without these specific reservations aren't likely to be favorable to a new tax, but they may be open to considering the mayor's position.
Second, you might focus on a single subset of the larger audience, obviating the need to take an average. A common college assignment that might require you to identify an audience of a text is an argument is an argument analysis or rhetorical analysis. For such an assignment, you might have a choice of choosing one of several potential audiences—in that case, it's almost always better to narrow down if possible.
In our TP-tax example, we have the choice of several subsets of the whole town (as defined by various types of traits): political conservatives, parents, the working class, etc. By drilling down to a specific stratum of the larger audience, we can identify their position on the issue with much more clarity and detail, which sets us up for a much more focused rhetorical analysis later, if that's the assignment.
Use Hedging Language
One final piece of advice you should consider when defining and describing an audience: Use hedging language to leave in some wiggle room. Hedging is when you pull back from stating something in absolute terms, opting instead to express some degree of uncertainty or softness about the claims you are making.
Let's look at the last example again, this time with the hedging language highlighted:
The audience of the mayor's announcement is likely to be, for a variety of reasons, somewhere between neutral and hostile. Those with a specific political aversion to taxes or an economic reason to oppose a new financial burden—such as poorer members of the community, parents of large families, or those who work in toilet paper-purchasing businesses and organizations—will probably be more hostile to the claim. Even those members of the community without these specific reservations aren't likely to be favorable to a new tax, but they may be open to considering the mayor's position.
No audience is perfectly uniform, so you should leave space for variance by employing hedging language like this in your own writing about audience.
Conclusion
There you have it: how to figure out who the audience is and how to describe that audience in useful, specific ways.
While there's no simple and absolute formula you can follow to ensure perfect results every time, these pointers should serve you well, helping you make confident inferences that you can defend by pointing to evidence both in and out of the text in question.
