CPN 101: Audience Analysis

Many college classes require students to read essays, articles, and even entire books written for different audiences. Determining the audience for a text can help readers place other writers’ interests, ideas, and arguments in a larger context, thereby helping readers start inquiring, researching, and responding to an issue. Sometimes writing will have a relatively small audience like an academic discipline’s research community, a specific geographic population, or a group with a niche interest. Other times, writers will assume a much larger audience, like every voter in a nationwide election. Knowing who a writer is trying to reach can help students find ways to extend another writer’s argument or counter it, thus crafting an original argument and not simply repeating other writers’ ideas. Additionally, knowing who other writers have tried to reach with their writing and how they’ve tried to appeal to their audiences can help students decide how to best connect with and convince their own readers. Organization, tone, word choice, and where and when writing appears can all provide clues to help readers learn more about an audience (or audiences).

The audience analysis assignment can entail different tasks. Some CPN 101 classes could ask students to identify and elaborate on details about the audience for an assigned article or an article they find on their own by using elements from the article as supporting evidence. Where an article appears, when it appears, its title, the complexity or simplicity of its logic, what evidence it provides, who and what it references, what it does not include, and how it appeals to an audience can all provide useful information to help critical readers deduce who a writer wants to interest, convince, or entertain. Additionally, other CPN 101 classes could require students to reflect on their own readers and what choices they’ve made to best accomplish their own rhetorical purposes for their specific audience. Alternatively, an Analyzing Audience assignment could ask students to propose changes that would need to be made for an assigned or selected source to reach a different audience, almost like a translation or revision proposal. However a CPN 101 instructor designs the Audience Analysis assignment, students will focus on the way that knowledge of an audience and their needs as readers impacts the writer’s choices.

Through the Audience Analysis assignment, students will:

• Use critical reading as a means to consider genre and other writers’ rhetorical choices;
• Reflect on how their own choices as writers affect different readers and different audiences; and
• Be able to produce coherent texts that demonstrate how audience relates to and contributes to writers’ choices.

Things to Keep in Mind about Audience Analysis

To start analyzing the audience for a particular piece of writing, see if you yourself are the intended audience for that writing. While being the audience for an article or essay might seem like the easiest path to analyzing an audience, being the audience can keep you from seeing who else might be the audience, thereby limiting your analysis. For example, if an article’s audience seems to be college students, you might assume that you are the audience, but an article might be intended for not all college students but college students in New York state, college students at public universities, or college student-athletes. Conversely, an article that encourages young people to complete their undergraduate degrees could have an audience of people deciding whether or not to enroll in college as well as students who are considering dropping out. Brainstorming and considering multiple possible audiences can help you to see possibilities that might not be apparent in first reading a text.

Furthermore, the location of a text can help you understand who a writer imagines reading their work. Learning more about the website or publication offering an article or essay – its history, political stance, and trustworthiness – should provide valuable details to help you determine why a writer wrote as she did. A word to the wise: be thorough when researching this information! Seeing what the website or publication says about itself (for instance on the “About” section of its website) and what other sources (even sources common as Wikipedia) say about it are equally important steps to take on the path towards completing a successful audience analysis.