Comedians sometimes get hit with a bad experience called bombing.
They get up on stage, go through their routine, tell joke after joke, and then...
the audience is silent or heckles them for how bad everything is.
Ouch!
That’d be a punch right to the ego.
Even if we don’t get up on stage, many of us have written something that missed the mark,
maybe even annoying or offending our audience.
When this happens, we want to know why it bombed and how to avoid it in the future.
The answer lies in the complex and important work of connecting with our audiences.
We’ve been practicing these connections for most of our lives, from our casual conversations
to formal writing assignments.
But today, we’ll talk about how we can be a little more methodical to form relationships
with audiences,
observe the effects of our writing, and achieve our persuasive writing goals.
This is Study Hall: Composition, presented by Arizona State University and Crash Course.
I’m Yumna Samie, let’s get started.
Not all writing is meant for others to see:
I put a shiny lock on my diary when I was in 3rd grade for a reason.
No one needed to know that I was the one who stole Little House on the Prairie from the
classroom library.
Sorry Mr. Smith.
But when our writing is read by someone else, what it means becomes cloudier.
At that point, meaning isn’t just what the writer thought about when they wrote something down.
It’s a negotiation, a back-and-forth, between the writer, the text, and the reader.
Different audiences read differently, especially across times and places.
Words may change meanings over time, so an essay from 200 years ago might not mean the
same thing today because “meat” doesn’t mean what it did then.
You might picture a hamburger when the writer really meant “horse food.”
Language, am I right?
If we want our writing to connect with people, we have to think about how those people will
understand it.
So when we’re making writing decisions, we choose everything from the words we use
to the font we pick with our audience in mind.
To understand our audiences’ likes and dislikes, expectations, and needs,
we have to go on a bit of an abstract journey.
But doing that can grow our empathy, or understanding of the feelings, needs, and lives of others.
Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford, two famous rhetoric and composition scholars,
coined two terms to describe how we think about audiences:
audience addressed and audience invoked.
The audience addressed is the actual people who see our work.
There is only so much we can do to know how they’ll receive our work, because they are
living real lives:
they get distracted, have personal agendas, and have different past reading experiences.
There are complex personalities within an audience addressed that we can understand
pretty much only in small groups of people we know personally.
And even then, it’s exhausting to try to imagine every tiny factor that impacts how
they read our work.
So rather than writing for our audience addressed,
since the writing process can be exhausting enough,
we usually write for our audience invoked.
Audience invoked is the audience we imagine and aim to connect with.
We create an image or model of who our audience is as a group: their preferences, needs, and
other characteristics.
We build our audience invoked over time, by learning and incorporating facts
about some real people in our audience addressed.
To understand audience addressed and audience invoked, let’s see a Writer in Action.
Minh is the reporter for the tiny Gooseburg Sentinel newspaper.
Gooseburg’s primary industry is goose farming.
Minh was a little overwhelmed when he got this job after finishing a big-city journalism degree
since his audience addressed was usually urban city-dwellers or, you know, his professors.
Minh knows the exact audience addressed of the Gooseberg Sentinel:
the 1,458 goose farmers and residents who subscribe to the newspaper.
However, he doesn’t know them personally, and can’t relate super well to their needs
at first.
He knows that his audience invoked has to change to reflect the actual readers of his
newspaper if he wants to connect with them.
To make sure he writes his articles in a persuasive way, he researches the most common
goose farming techniques.
This helps him gain credibility and relevance.
He also works to avoid any stereotypes that people in the city have about rural living,
focusing instead on how the farmers and other Gooseburg citizens describe themselves when
he talks to them.
Over time, his audience invoked takes on more subtle qualities.
Minh picks topics for stories that are valuable to them, like the latest anti-bite gloves
for goose wrangling.
And he avoids ways of writing that they find offensive or frustrating,
including broad assumptions about goose farmers being introverted and stoic.
As it turns out, Gooseburg has a thriving debate society that needed coverage in the
local paper.
Eventually, he gets enough credit that he can land a little humor, one of his favorite
parts of writing.
His joke about a local music group’s ‘goose being cooked’ at the Battle of the Bands
had his neighbors chuckling for days.
His writing style is still his own, and by building a more accurate audience invoked,
he’s able to increase the readership of the paper with a new monthly goose-related
humor column.
Minh is a writer in action!
The trick of writing to an audience invoked is to keep learning as much as we can about
the real members of our audience,
while remembering that our audience addressed might still surprise us with their reactions.
Creating a reasonably complex audience invoked is really challenging.
Here are three strategies for getting clarity and connecting with our audiences better over time.
Our first tool is to consider access.
This critical thinking step involves considering the ways people find your writing
and figuring out whether that method says anything about them as members of particular groups.
You can consider access when you mentally narrow down how many people will be able to
physically access your writing.
In class, for instance, it’s likely only your teacher will read it.
You can also narrow it down in your mind by who is likely to read it.
If your writing is behind a paywall on the internet, where only subscribers can see it,
you can reasonably assume that ‘subscribers to Goose Fancy’ are the main audience for
your work.
Even if you don’t know everything about your audience, you know that they had to get
access to your work,
which might show that they like a particular political party, or that they’re studying
mechanical engineering,
or even that they have a certain language background, given that many pieces are only
offered in one language.
Another technique is to consider the medium, or the type of communication or publication,
of your writing.
We want to consider what we know about the kind of people who read and interact with
this medium.
To use this technique for yourself, write down as much as you can about the medium,
what the norms are for writing there, and what people expect from the content of those texts.
Then make notes about the kind of people who use the medium,
and how this audience information affects how you want to convey your message in your text.
Say you specifically want to reach tech-savvy business owners with your technique
for sustainable growth in start-up companies.
You might choose a LinkedIn blog post in order to reach the group that uses LinkedIn a lot.
However, if your strategy for sustainable growth involves dozens of sources, testimonials,
and steps to explain,
you may accept that your message is better suited for an academic journal.
That way, the kinds of people who read it will be interested in deep-dives on business topics.
Once you’ve narrowed down your audience’s access and your medium, you can get down to
your message and the best way to express it.
Whenever we mention a term or concept, we need to explain it.
Just because we’ve known about Zeno's Paradox or Beyonce’s Lemonade
or Adenosine Triphosphate for a long time doesn’t mean they’re common knowledge.
Even in Study Hall, we try and define all the jargon we throw your way, like “audience
addressed” and “audience invoked.”
This is where our third tool can come in:
leveling down our writing, or shifting our explanations down a bit in complexity to help
people understand us better.
For instance, if a professor is writing for juniors taking an advanced-level Forensic
Anthropology class in college,
she might reread that writing through the eyes of a first-year student:
she’d think through what would confuse them, and choose to be more explicit in those spots,
just in case a few of the juniors made it this far without learning that one concept.
Being really clear almost always closes the gap a little between your audience invoked
and audience addressed,
since there are fewer and fewer places where someone could say, “wait, I’ve never heard
that idea before.”
If you employ this too early in the writing process, you may oversimplify the concepts
for your audience,
so save this as a revision technique.
Connecting with an audience involves a lot of complexity, and even figuring out who our
audience is can be a difficult task.
That said, we’re not going to throw up our hands and stop trying;
instead, we work in small steps toward understanding audiences better
so that we can connect with and eventually share our ideas with them.
When comedians understand more about who is their audience is
they can cut jokes that would seem uninteresting or just confusing to the people who tend to
frequent that comedy open mic.
Even when a comedian considers the audience's needs, expectations, and personhood,
they’ll still occasionally get a joke that no one likes.
But everything they learn, like everything we learn about our audiences, helps them connect
better next time.
Join us next time when we start considering the impact of context in our writing and how
it affects how successful we are in our writing goals.
Thanks for watching Study Hall: Composition, which is produced by Arizona State University
and the Crash Course team at Complexly.
If you liked this video and want to keep learning with us here in Study Hall, be sure to subscribe.
You can learn more about ASU and the videos produced by Crash Course
in the links in the description.
See you next time!