Audience Analysis
Audience analysis has always been a central concern of rhetoric and more recently of technical communication. Writing that incorporates a keen awareness of the audience or reader is rhetorical in nature rather than purely expressive. Much writing in a traditional composition class does not require the writer to contemplate the reader or the reader’s reactions. Practical writing is always embedded in real situations, written from someone with a purpose and agenda to someone else who may or may not be favorably disposed to the writer’s agenda. Thus, effective writing attempts to accommodate the reader as much as possible.
These notes describe three varieties of audience analysis and then discusses how the concepts of identification and dissociation and of bias analysis can contribute to effective audience analysis.
1. Role Analysis: One way to try to figure out what a reader’s response is likely to be is to try to put yourself in the reader’s role. This approach is common for communication within organizations, where people function primarily in their assigned capacities. Someone assigned to oversee design projects has a set of concerns that grow out of her role. Some assigned to represent the company or organization to clients or the public has another set of concerns. One of the best diagrammatic representations of this approach is the ego-centric chart developed by Mathes and Stevenson(see figure below).
By considering everyone who might read the memo, email or report, the writer can tabulate the concerns of the audience and attempt to address these concerns effectively. The real problem with multiple-role audiences is that the writer will probably have to talk about some things of interest to a portion of the audience but not to the rest of the audience. This phenomenon has led to the practice of writing executive summaries and attaching extensive appendices, thus covering the whole subject, but allowing audiences to ignore large portions of it. It has also led to the practice of writing different reports for different readers.
2. Personal Analysis. Another approach has been to think of the readers not as one-dimensional role players but as complete human beings who just happen to be filling a role. This approach broadens the analysis so that the writer considers the reader’s education, value system, family situation, religion, and so on. Aristotle suggested such an approach to analyzing audiences, characterizing people according to whether they were young or old, well to do or poor, and so on. His analysis, in Book II, chapters 12 and following of his Rhetoric, may recognize the personal dimension of the audience, but it also depicts people as stereotypes. Young people are rash and optimistic. Older people are cautious.
Mathes and Stevenson attempt to combine analysis based on roles and operational responsibilities with analysis based on personal characteristics in the following audience analysis rubric:
3. Direct Contact. Karen Shriver has suggested that some people analyze audiences through classification (kind of like Aristotle’s approach), some through imagining (one literary critic, Walter Ong, has suggested that the reader is always a fiction) what the reader is like, but some actually go out to discover who the readers are and what their concerns are.
At the most impersonal end of the spectrum, this kind of “feed-back driven” audience analysis may take the form of a survey conducted on the streets or among customers. A more personal form of direct-contact audience analysis occurs when the writer goes to likely readers directly, perhaps in focus groups, perhaps simply going to observe the person at work and to ask questions.
Another form of direct-contact audience analysis is usability testing. In this case, the writer develops the document and invites people to read or use it. By observing the readers as they read or as they try to follow the directions of the document, the writer becomes aware of weaknesses in the document and reader priorities.
Identification and Dissociation. Having surveyed three traditional and practical ways to analyze an audience, I turn to the theoretical concepts of identification and dissociation.
Kenneth Burke, a noted modern rhetorical theorist, claimed that when people try to persuade others, they do so by creating identifications. What he meant was that the speaker or writer shows that she shares the concerns and values of the audience. The audience will then think of the writer as advocating something in line with their best interests and aligned with their purposes. So, for instance, in arguing for a change in the general education writing requirements, a person might try to convince the English faculty that this change will improve writing instruction, will make more interesting writing courses available to the teachers, and will make possible a reduced teaching load for faculty. These benefits indicate a common ground between the writer and his audience. In short they constitute points of identification.
Chaim Perelman and Lucy Olbrechts-Tyteca, a couple other modern rhetorical theorists, have described the process of changing an audience’s mind as one of dissociation. By this term, they mean the process in which the writer severs traditional associations between linked concepts that are embraced by the audience, showing that ideas, values, or objects normally thought to complement each other actually have no essential compatibility: they just happen to exist together in the audience’s mind. Having dissociated ideas from each other, the writer is then able to create new associations, showing that a suggested change—a new idea, value, or object—is compatible with, perhaps even enhancing to, one of the original pair. This new mental association replaces the older one, making change possible. Notice that this theory shares with Burke’s theory of identification the notion that new ideas have to be linked with something already valued by the audience.
These concepts compliment traditional audience analysis techniques because they invite the writer to seek common ground with the reader, to understand what is already accepted, and to figure out how to link the new idea with something the reader already believes.
Bias. Finally, I turn briefly to the concept of bias. Modernism suggested that people are able to look at ideas “objectively,” as though they do not come to things from a certain perspective laden with values and beliefs. Post modern theory debunks the myth of objectivity, claiming that there is no neutral, unbiased ground for the reader to stand on. This understanding of bias shifts the emphasis of rhetoric away from purely rational arguments presented as though the reader were a logic machine that will tally up the arguments and make a decision based on the arguments’ merits. Instead, it suggests that arguments appear to be convincing or unconvincing based on the audience’s pre-existent allegiances. Although logical arguments are still considered important, we now recognize that we need to consider the reader’s likely emotional reactions based on her perspective and the reader’s likely attribution of motive to the writer based on suspicion or good well.
The rhetorical concepts of burden of proof and presumption are 19th Century constructs that recognize that the audience’s predisposition affect their reception of the message. Basically, if you have presumption as a writer, you can assume that the readers are disposed to accept your message--they already want to believe. If you have burden of proof, conversely, you have to turn the audience away from their original proclivity to reject your message. Traditionally, the person with presumption simply needs to be sure that the alternative position doesn't prove the case beyond doubt. The person with burden of proof has to produce overwhelming evidence or particularly strong alternative identifications and associations to win the audience.