Audience
Who is the intended audience?Considering your audience is critical when you are writing a speech. Therefore, it is critical that you
consider who the author’s audience is in order to understand the text. What do you know about them?
What’s the relationship between the speaker/author and the intended audience? What sort of values or
prior ideas might the audience have? How might that affect their perception of the speaker/author?
- How might a politician’s Election Eve speech to a conservative group differ from his speech to a
liberal group?
Take Note!
Same speaker...same
occasion...different
audience!When speaking to groups that are very different, a politician is going to cater his speech to each group’s
values. To the conservatives, she will speak on conservative issues and to the liberals, the liberal issues.
The politician likely has different goals for each.
- How would a principal’s message to a group of new teachers be different from a message to a
group of experienced teachers?
A principal is more likely to be more informal in tone to experienced teachers and provide less detailed
information. With new teachers, however, the principal will likely want to make a good impression as
well as make sure the teachers understand her role as a supportive authority. With new teachers the
principal will also need to give very clear information and perhaps repeat that information more than
once and explain all the things the experienced teachers already know about the school.
So, remember: The audience can entirely change a work. When reading your source text for the essay,
make sure to consider who the audience is and how that affected how the author built his or her argument.
Purpose
What is the author or speaker’s intention?Occasion, Subject, and Audience all contribute to Purpose. What is the author trying to accomplish with
this work? Is it an attack? Defense? Persuasion? Does it aim to give praise or blame? Is its goal to teach,
or something else?