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Becoming A Master Student, Concise, Tenth Edition
Dave Ellis
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Chapter 4: Remembering The Audience
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Readers provide an audience for writers. Readers come from different backgrounds (nations, communities, ethnic groups, business companies, and interest groups such as poets or technology experts), and they read in a variety of contexts (informal letter exchange, the Internet, business interactions, and college disciplines, including scientific fields). Thus, as a writer, you need to consider who your readers are and what their backgrounds will lead them to expect.
- Readers of languages other than English may expect and appreciate obliqueness, ornate language, and digressions. Readers of English generally value simplicity and directness more highly.
- Readers who are used to reading technical prose will be quite happy with technical terms. Readers less familiar with technology will need to have terms explained.
- Readers of religious inspirational texts may expect repetition, parallel structures, and figurative language.
- Readers of reported conversations will expect slang, contractions, and regional and ethnic dialect forms in words and sentence grammar.
- College professors and readers of business reports in North America tend to expect the statement of a thesis, development and support of the thesis, strong use of details, and the use of standard edited English (the language written by educated speakers, with common conventions of grammar, spelling, and vocabulary).
Can you think of instances in your collegiate experience when your audience may affect the way you approach a writing assignment?
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