A Sense of Audience or Conventional Wisdom?

Latleie J. Andersen

In recent years, composition teachers and scholars have increas­ingly turned their attention toward audience analysis and its role in the composing process. One need only review Lisa Ede’s “Audience: An Introduction to Research” or Barry Kroll’s “Writing for Readers: Three Perspectives on Audience” to see the vast assortment of cur­rent theories concerned with audience and how to help students achieve a “sense” of audience in their writing.

I’m sure most of us would agree that writers who recognize the need to analyze their audiences stand a greater chance of producing suitable prose. Yet, audience considerations alone are not enough to guarantee a document’s effectiveness. Writers must also consider contextual and conventional “register,” and the interplay between audience and convention. As teachers and researchers, we, too, must discover how best to use the interplay between audience and convention to teach students to write effectively and appropriately.

According to Frank Smith, a writing convention is “an expected way of doing something that is accepted by all parties concerned, an implicit understanding” (59). Register, he says, refers to the different ways of using language (78). A conventional register, then, refers to an accepted, imposed, or expected way of writing that is shared by both writer and reader, without which understanding is restricted or lost. Douglas Park refers to conventions as “givens" about readers’ attitudes and knowledge (252). Audience analysis, he says, is a matter of identifying the “givens” implicit in a piece of writing and evaluating the relationship between these “givens” and the contexts more explicitly defined within the discourse itself. Steven Mailloux further divides conventions into three categories relevant to human action: 1) traditional conventions that recognize regularities in action and belief; 2) regulative conventions that regulate action; and 3) constitutive conventions that determine meaning (126-27). These scholars suggest that teachers of writing must pay more attention to conventions as they relate to audience because audience considera­tions do not sufficiently explain the writer-reader relationship.

In order to examine the role of conventional register in writing, I selected articles from two general readership magazines: Newsweek and Harper’s. Both articles deal with the subject of AIDS. I chose this particular topic because 1) there is widespread interest in it (that is, it attracts a large and varied audience of interested readers); and 2) there is an abundance of available information about it, much of it technical and some of it controversial; thus, the topic presents certain difficulties to the writer composing for a lay audience. In addition, I chose Harper’s and Newsweek because they are classified as general readership publications with similar reader demo­graphics. Harper’s, published monthly, is a general interest magazine; Newsweek, a weekly news magazine that covers politics and world affairs. Executives at Newsweek claim it attracts young, affluent, well-educated readers from within the general population (Cans 219). Harper’s portrays itself as a magazine for well-educated, socially concerned, widely read men and women who value ideas and good writing (Writer’s Market 297). A Fry readability test shows Newsweek’s AIDS article to be written slightly above the twelfth-grade level, while the Harper’s story is written slightly below that level.

If a writer simply notes these general audience characteristics, it would seem as though he or she could compose an article about AIDS and submit it to both publications with relative certainty of its appropriateness for either magazine’s audience. Such is not the case, however. Each magazine’s conventional register dictates that the format and content of the articles differ from each other.

Even before starting to read the articles, one notices major differences in the way each is laid out for the reader. Newsweek’s coverage of AIDS is made up of a main story accompanied by four “sidebar” articles—adjoining articles that relate to the main story and expand upon some facet of that story. The sidebar is frequently used in newspapers; it is, in fact, a feature of the conventional register of newspaper journalism. This, perhaps, accounts for its use by Newsweek, since Newsweek categorizes itself as a “news” magazine. Newsweek’s use of the sidebar suggests to readers that they are receiving important and timely information that expands upon the news they see in their daily newspapers. Use of the sidebar format creates a persona for Newsweek that helps readers associate the magazine with journalistic news.

In contrast, Harper’s presents its article in the format of a forum discussion held by a group of ten physicians, scientists, public health officials, and medical historians. This format provides a running dialogue among members of the panel. Panelists are introduced at the beginning of the article and referred to within the text by their last names followed by statements attributed to them. A modera­tor’s remarks are handled in the same manner. The Harper’s for­mat, rarely seen in newspapers, does not provide readily discernible visual clues as to where specific aspects of the AIDS issue appear within the text. In contrast to Newsweek’s sidebars, which allow readers to focus quickly on particular aspects of the AIDS issue, Harper’s format forces readers to read through the article to pick out points of primary interest.

Such format decisions, while appearing to be rather arbitrary in nature, actually reflect the conventional registers of each magazine—registers most likely based upon, and affected by, audience considerations. Newspaper journalists assume that their readers have a limited time to read the paper yet still want to feel as though they have gotten all the news they need. (Thus, the use of the inverted pyramid style of news reporting.) Editors assume that sidebars facilitate reading by setting apart certain important or interesting elements of the main story and by breaking stories down into smaller chunks that are more easily digested in a single reading. One might argue, based upon the differences in format between the two publications, that Newsweek’s staff presumes readers will spend limited time with their magazine, using it to recap or extend current knowledge obtained from other news sources. Harper’s staff, on the other hand, hypothesizes that readers will spend considerably more time in digesting the magazine’s contents. Also, Harper’s readers do have a longer period of time between issues (a month vs. a week) and may be more likely to keep the magazine on hand and read it more thoroughly than Newsweek’s readers do. Thus, Harper’s can afford to use a format that requires extra reading time and con­centration. Such audience considerations constitute the conven­tional “givens” for each publication, and a writer must be aware of them in order to write an appropriate article for either magazine. Our students, too, need to be aware of such conventional givens when writing their own documents.

Other factors help to define a publication’s conventional register. For example, Harper’s, which claims to have an upscale, well-read audience, provides articles that have clearly defined story lines and a wealth of precise supporting details. It also provides with each article a summary introduction that clearly states its purpose. The following excerpt is typical of Harper’s detail-packed articles:
Dr. Gab’s group was able to develop a blood test, called the ELISA test, which indicates whether someone has been exposed to the virus. This test does not detect disease, only the antibodies formed when someone has been exposed to LAV/HTLV-III. But it can be used to screen contaminated blood from the blood supply and to estimate the spread of the virus. (41)

In contrast, Newsweek’s article begins with a narrative scenario, describes the growing fear of AIDS, and then moves into a discus­sion of measures being planned to combat the disease. Its use of specific facts is limited primarily to describing selected individuals in narrative situations. Throughout much of the article, facts are presented in a generalized form that lacks precise detail. Here is an example:
The development of a test to indicate whether a person has been exposed to the AIDS virus has made nation’s blood supply almost entirely safe again. (18)

Since both Harper’s and Newsweek regard their audiences as coming from the more affluent, better-educated segments of the general population, what determines how much information each publication will provide for its audience and how it be presented? Does the Harper’s writer assume that a well-educated audience demands a rich assortment of facts because of its greater educational exposure? And does the Newsweek writer assume that his or her well-educated group of professionals is too busy to bother with specific details and simply needs to be given the facts in a more generalized form?

Because we are dealing with essentially the same audience in terms of demographics, the most logical answer to these questions is that these decisions depend in part upon what readers expect to get when they choose a particular source of information. Newsweek’s readers expect the magazine to publish news about AIDS in greater detail than they are able to get from their daily news source; but they also expect to receive the news in a form that facilitates easy digestion of fads. Harper’s readers, on the other hand, may choose that magazine because they hope to become better informed about a variety of issues through articles written in a fashion that they consider more literary than journalistic. They expect the kind of detail shown in the Harper’s excerpt they probably would not expect to find news in such detail in a copy of Newsweek.

Along similar lines, Newsweek’s story contains a much higher level of emotional appeal, as evidenced in the following two passages:
For the first time, talk of a quarantine, previously confined to a handful of gay-baiting aackpots, has begun appearing in such high-minded forums as The Washington Post. ... (18)

AIDS is a disease that cuts to the quick of people’s most intense fears and de­sires, and that is why it exerts such a powerful force over us; even drug addicts sometimes resist the simple precaution of using sterile syringes be­cause of the powerful emotional element involved in sharing a needle. (23)

The emotional images in the Harper’s article are a reflection of the panel members’ personalities. Readers become invisible observers in the panelists’ discussion:
Besides the obvious ethical issues this raises, if we tried to lock up all those infected, we would have to imprison upward of a million people, most of whom are not sick. And how would we identify the infected people? My God, we would have to give everyone in the country a blood test. ... (47)

It is possible that Jackler did not consciously think about being more specific because regulatory conventions at the Post may have provided unwritten guidelines for approaching the issue within the bounds of “good taste.” Paradoxically, it may be that the fear of causing panic by omitting details exerted pressure on journalists at Harper’s to become more specific in explaining how AIDS is transmitted, despite concerns about taste. That is, excluding details considered to be in bad taste could have created a panic situation for people who had read previously that the disease is transmitted by “intimate sexual contact” or “exchange of bodily fluids” and who had begun to worry that the virus could be passed by normal hetero­sexual relations or even by kissing or biting. At least in this case, the audience’s need to know overrode the regulatory conventions of good taste.

The foregoing examination admittedly overlooks many features of conventional registers within written texts. A definitive study of convention and context within writing should at the very least address a story’s angle or story line; its use of narrative; its organizational plan, including the manner in which the story is laid out or presented to the reader; its persona; the amount and level of substantiation; the use of generalization versus the use of specific details; the use of emotional signals and intensifiers; style and format; and levels of vocabulary, diction, syntax, and tone.

My aim here is to draw attention to the many features and types of conventional registers and to underscore their relationship to audience considerations. The previous examples show that knowl­edge of general audience characteristics is not enough in and of itself to assure that a writer produces a piece suited to each particular magazine. A survey of journalism texts, for example, reveals that few refer directly to the writer’s audience. The primary focus in texts that teach news-writing appears to be format and style. I believe this emphasis exists because news style—active sentence construction, simple diction, inverted pyramid organization—has come to represent a journalistic convention.

If this is so, it is not because journalists lack information about their audiences. Primarily for purposes of expanding audiences and profits, news organizations conduct audience research in demographics and even psychographics. They know, for instance, that magazine audiences are made up predominantly of a mix of affluent, well-educated professionals, technicians, managers, and median-to-moderate income, high-school-educated white and blue­-collar workers—middle Americans (Cans 224).

Magazine executives most daily newspapers. In cases such as these, it is doubtful that knowledge of audience alone would help a writer distinguish when or when not to incorporate editorializing or high emotional appeal into a written piece.

Clearly, the two AIDS articles reveal many examples of differences in register. I will point out only one more, however, to show that analysis of conventions should take into account not only what exists in the text, but also what is missing.

The Newsweek article refers to the transmission of the AIDS virus as follows:

The leading researchers who have studied AIDS are unanimous in saying that It Is known to be transmitted In only two ways: by sexual contact, cs­pccially among homosexual men, or by exposure to infected blood. (18)

Harper’s covers the problem this way:

Certain sexual acts also seem to facilitate transmission of the virus. In par­ticular, anal-receptive intercourse may facilitate both transmission—by letting infected sperm into the bloodstream—and an immunological reaction to that sperm. (4243)

I have already noted that Harper’s tends to make greater use of specific detail than does Newsweek. However, there seems to be more than just traditional convention at work in this case. Harper’s specificity about how the AIDS virus is transmitted moves into the area of regulatory conventions—those which Mailloux suggests stipulate what should and should not be written (133). (In its crudest form, he says, the regulatory conventions of literature are a form of censorship.) Herbert Cans cites four protective concerns that journalists must consider when writing and which may lead them to exclude certain facts from stories: shock value; details that might cause panic; information that might encourage imitative behavior; and taste, manifested in taboos against nudity, profanity, and the like and probably the consideration most often taken into account by journalists (24246).

The preceding excerpts would seem to invoke considerations of taste for a writer hoping to publish a story for the general populace. What is interesting to note is how differently each publication handles the matter. Harper’s, by printing how anal-receptive inter­course facilitates transmission “by letting infected sperm into the bloodstream,” provides specific detail that can only be guessed at by reading the main Newsweek article. Conventional restrictions of taste may have kept Newsweek from covering AIDS transmission in more explicit detail. In fact, the following citation from a sidebar article to Newsweek’s main story directly addresses the issue of press coverage of AIDS and protective considerations of taste:

Perhaps the most common problem is a squeamish lack of specificity. Until quite recently, almost every television news program and large numbers of newspapers have observed an informal taboo. The disease is often said to be use such information to develop their own unique persona, which distinguishes their magazines from others and delivers a target audience of consumers to advertisers (Peterson 64,295).

Apart from the marketing of magazines and newspapers, however, audience research appears to fall on deaf ears. Cans states that he began his study with the assumption that journalists, be-cause they were “commercial” employees, would take audience directly into account when selecting and producing stories. He admits he was surprised to find that journalists actually have little knowledge about their audience and were suspicious of and tended to reject direct audience feedback. He believes that journalists’ reluctance to accept feedback reflects a fear of audience—especially of its size. Journalists, he says, cannot keep their audience in mind because of its massive size and, also, because they do not believe their audience is capable of determining what news it needs. Journalists see themselves as professionals serving a predominantly lay clientele who must be given what they need, not what they want. Of particular interest is the fact that when Cans asked them for whom they were writing, they always began with their supervisors, and some went no further. Others said that they received feedback from a “near” or known audience-family members, friends, neighbors—and that they assumed that the known audience’s feed­back was sufficiently representative of the total audience. Still others indicated that they wrote and edited for themselves, assum­ing a congruence of their own and the audience’s feelings (234-35).

Above all, product considerations, those marketing decisions which take audience into account, exempt journalists from having to do so themselves (Cans 230). In other words, audience con­siderations inform the conventions and contexts implicit in products. This seems to support the view of William Irmscher, as set forth in a 1979 CCCC paper and referred to by Park, which suggests that “a sure intuitive grasp of the appropriate conventions may allow a writer not to be overly concerned with and therefore inhibited by the worries about audience. It may allow a more easy concentration upon the subject at hand” (254).

Clearly, the way journalists and other professional writers approach their audiences underscores my assertion that audience considerations alone are not enough. Cranted, most students may not be interested in writing articles for newspapers or magazines unless journalism is their major. But if we are going to teach students to pay attention to audience when they write-whether they are writing letters, business reports, term papers, or short stories—then we should also teach them to be aware of and to look for the contextual and conventional cues implicit in each of these genres.

Carol Berkenkotter, in “Understanding a Writer’s Awareness of Audiertce,” points out that most of the subjects in her study “created individual rhetorical contexts or scenarios” in order to accomplish their writing tasks (395). She describes how the ability to create context has an important heuristic function for a particular writer. The context-creating activity of this writer stimulates him to generate a complex rhetorical goal: to match the pattern of his talk to one with which his audience is already familiar... To do this, he plans to study the format of the career brochures his audience is reading so that as he writes, he can “put my ideas into a context that is familiar to them already.” (395)

If we can teach students to be aware of and understand conventions, then they, too, can begin to express their ideas in contexts that represent familiar and appropriately constructed cues for sharing meaning with an audience. “Because conventions are rules used in various interactions,” says Wolfgang Iser, “they can be said to reside neither entirely in the text nor in the reader, but within their relationship” (Ray 51). As writers or readers, however, we tend not to be be consciously aware of conventions in everyday life, even though they are the impetus that allows interaction between reader and text. What we must do is lift conventions out of their day-to- Y day context so that they strike our students’ attention; then we can guide them in examining conventions as a means for consciously developing written material appropriate to the task at hand.

The exploration and development of context and convention may actually do more to help students discover a “sense” of audience than attempts to analyze how they should write to a generalized mass audience. Conventions already exist within each of us-as readers we unconsciously impose conventional expectations onto every text we read. As composition instructors and researchers, we must bring conventional registers to our students consciousness and use them as a tool to teach students to write effectively and appropriately.

Arizona State University

Tempe, Arizona
Works Cited
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