Chapter 2: Audience and Purpose

Whenever you write anything, you must first know who are you writing this for? Why are you writing this? The first time when you approach a text, it is important to think about purpose and audience. The two main factors that need to be considered are:

• Who is it for?
• What do you know about them?

Th definition of AUDIENCE is, "A particular group of readers or viewers that the writer is addressing."

There are 4 types of Audience:

1. Yourself 
• know exactly how much detail is required and no formalities required.
2. Personal friend(s) 
• good idea of how much detail is necessary and can be informal.
3. People you don't know personally but you know something about them 
• a reasonable idea of how much detail is necessary and reasonable formal style.
4. Remote Audience
• writing must always explicit and is likely to be formal, such as in a college essay.

Who is the Audience?

You will have one other issue to consider - a distinction between PRIMARY AUDIENCE & SECONDARY  AUDIENCE.

• PRIMARY AUDIENCE - the reader(s) whom your document is primarily intended (must read all your thing)
• SECONDARY AUDIENCE - other reader(s) who may have reason to read or all of your document. (optional if the person wants to read all or part of it or even not reading it)

When writing anything, you must identify who is your audience, how should be writing it, below are the 5 points on Identifying Audience.

• Age Groups
• Gender
• Language
• Income and Status
• Race and Ethnicity

What is a PURPOSE? The definition od PURPOSE is, "An author's purpose is his/her main reason for writing." The main consideration factor for PURPOSE is: Who is this for?

All authors write for a reason, authors write for one of the four reason - to DESCRIBE, to ENTERTAIN, to EXPLAIN, or to PERSUADE. (I call it DEEP)

DEEP

1. DESCRIBE - reading passage contains many details about a person, place, or thing.
2. ENTERTAIN - reading passage is enjoyable, tells a personal story, or uses a story to teach a lesson.
3. EXPLAIN - reading passage provides facts about a particular subject or tells readers how to do something.
4. PERSUADE - reading passage tries to get readers to do something, buy something, or believe something.

RHETORICAL TRIANGLE

With the Rhetorical Triangle, we can have the greatest impact on an argument, which the three things is focused: Writer, Audience, Context.

The 3 points on Rhetorical Triangle relate directly to three appeals you should consider when communicating.

• ETHOS - Building trust by establishing your credibility and authority (Writer).
• PATHOS - Appealing to emotion by connecting with your audience through their values and interest (Audience).
• LOGOS - Appeal to intelligence with well-constructed and clearly argued ideas (Context).

Hope that this could help you have more ideas on knowing what you want to write and how you should write it.

Thank you!