Audience Reading Your Own Drafts LUMEN Lesson Written Assignment Instructions: After reading the LUMEN lesson “Audience”, complete the following in prepara

Audience Reading Your Own Drafts LUMEN Lesson Written Assignment Instructions: After reading the LUMEN lesson “Audience”, complete the following in preparation for the upcoming module essay.
Choose one source/chapter from the assigned readings
Choose from the list below and write two summaries that each address a different audience in the pair:

An elementary school aged child and a grandparent
A parent and a college application
A boss/manager and a friend

After composing two summaries, write a third paragraph that explains your approach for addressing two different audiences. What stayed the same and what had to change? Why? Search
Audience
What this handout is about
This handout will help you understand and write for the appropriate audience when you
write an academic essay.
Audience matters
When you’re in the process of writing a paper, it’s easy to forget that you are actually
writing to someone. Whether you’ve thought about it consciously or not, you always write
to an audience: sometimes your audience is a very generalized group of readers, sometimes
you know the individuals who compose the audience, and sometimes you write for
yourself. Keeping your audience in mind while you write can help you make good decisions
about what material to include, how to organize your ideas, and how best to support your
argument.
To illustrate the impact of audience, imagine you’re writing a letter to your grandmother to
tell her about your first month of college. What details and stories might you include? What
might you leave out? Now imagine that you’re writing on the same topic but your audience
is your best friend. Unless you have an extremely cool grandma to whom you’re very close,
it’s likely that your two letters would look quite different in terms of content, structure, and
even tone.
Isn’t my instructor my audience?
Yes, your instructor or TA is probably the actual audience for your paper. Your instructors
read and grade your essays, and you want to keep their needs and perspectives in mind
when you write. However, when you write an essay with only your instructor in mind, you
might not say as much as you should or say it as clearly as you should, because you assume
that the person grading it knows more than you do and will fill in the gaps. This leaves it up
to the instructor to decide what you are really saying, and she might decide differently than
you expect. For example, she might decide that those gaps show that you don’t know and
understand the material. Remember that time when you said to yourself, “I don’t have to
explain communism; my instructor knows more about that than I do” and got back a paper
that said something like “Shows no understanding of communism”? That’s an example of
what can go awry when you think of your instructor as your only audience.
Thinking about your audience differently can improve your writing, especially in terms of
how clearly you express your argument. The clearer your points are, the more likely you
are to have a strong essay. Your instructor will say, “He really understands communism—
he’s able to explain it simply and clearly!” By treating your instructor as an intelligent but
uninformed audience, you end up addressing her more effectively.
How do I identify my audience and what they want from me?
Before you even begin the process of writing, take some time to consider who your
audience is and what they want from you. Use the following questions to help you identify
your audience and what you can do to address their wants and needs.
• Who is your audience?
• Might you have more than one audience? If so, how many audiences do you have? List
them.
• Does your assignment itself give any clues about your audience?
• What does your audience need? What do they want? What do they value?
• What is most important to them?
• What are they least likely to care about?
• What kind of organization would best help your audience understand and appreciate
your? What do you have to say (or what are you doing in your research) that might
surprise your audience?
• What do you want your audience to think, learn, or assume about you? What
impression do you want your writing or your research to convey?
How much should I explain?
This is the hard part. As we said earlier, you want to show your instructor that you know
the material. But different assignments call for varying degrees of information. Different
fields also have different expectations. For more about what each field tends to expect from
an essay, see the Writing Center handouts on writing in specific fields of study. The best
place to start figuring out how much you should say about each part of your paper is in a
careful reading of the assignment. We give you some tips for reading assignments and
figuring them out in our handout on how to read an assignment. The assignment may
specify an audience for your paper; sometimes the instructor will ask you to imagine that
you are writing to your congressperson, for a professional journal, to a group of specialists
in a particular field, or for a group of your peers. If the assignment doesn’t specify an
audience, you may find it most useful to imagine your classmates reading the paper, rather
than your instructor.
Now, knowing your imaginary audience, what other clues can you get from the assignment?
If the assignment asks you to summarize something that you have read, then your reader
wants you to include more examples from the text than if the assignment asks you to
interpret the passage. Most assignments in college focus on argument rather than the
repetition of learned information, so your reader probably doesn’t want a lengthy, detailed,
point-by-point summary of your reading (book reports in some classes and argument
reconstructions in philosophy classes are big exceptions to this rule). If your assignment
asks you to interpret or analyze the text (or an event or idea), then you want to make sure
that your explanation of the material is focused and not so detailed that you end up
spending more time on examples than on your analysis. If you are not sure about the
difference between explaining something and analyzing it, see our handouts on reading
the assignment and argument.
Once you have a draft, try your level of explanation out on a friend, a classmate, or a
Writing Center tutor. Get the person to read your rough draft, and then ask her to talk to
you about what she did and didn’t understand. (Now is not the time to talk about
proofreading stuff, so make sure she ignores those issues for the time being). You will likely
get one of the following responses or a combination of them:
• If your listener/reader has tons of questions about what you are saying, then you
probably need to explain more. Let’s say you are writing a paper on piranhas, and
your reader says, “What’s a piranha? Why do I need to know about them? How would
I identify one?” Those are vital questions that you clearly need to answer in your
paper. You need more detail and elaboration.
• If your reader seems confused, you probably need to explain more clearly. So if he
says, “Are there piranhas in the lakes around here?” you may not need to give more
examples, but rather focus on making sure your examples and points are clear.
• If your reader looks bored and can repeat back to you more details than she
needs to know to get your point, you probably explained too much. Excessive detail
can also be confusing, because it can bog the reader down and keep her from focusing
on your main points. You want your reader to say, “So it seems like your paper is
saying that piranhas are misunderstood creatures that are essential to South
American ecosystems,” not, “Uh… piranhas are important?” or, “Well, I know you said
piranhas don’t usually attack people, and they’re usually around 10 inches long, and
some people keep them in aquariums as pets, and dolphins are one of their predators,
and…a bunch of other stuff, I guess?”
Sometimes it’s not the amount of explanation that matters, but the word choice and tone
you adopt. Your word choice and tone need to match your audience’s expectations. For
example, imagine you are researching piranhas; you find an article in National Geographic
and another one in an academic journal for scientists. How would you expect the two
articles to sound? National Geographic is written for a popular audience; you might expect
it to have sentences like “The piranha generally lives in shallow rivers and streams in South
America.” The scientific journal, on the other hand, might use much more technical
language, because it’s written for an audience of specialists. A sentence like “Serrasalmus
piraya lives in fresh and brackish intercoastal and proto-arboreal sub-tropical regions
between the 45th and 38th parallels” might not be out of place in the journal.
Generally, you want your reader to know enough material to understand the points you are
making. It’s like the old forest/trees metaphor. If you give the reader nothing but trees, she
won’t see the forest (your thesis, the reason for your paper). If you give her a big forest and
no trees, she won’t know how you got to the forest (she might say, “Your point is fine, but
you haven’t proven it to me”). You want the reader to say, “Nice forest, and those trees
really help me to see it.” Our handout on paragraph development can help you find a
good balance of examples and explanation.
Reading your own drafts
Writers tend to read over their own papers pretty quickly, with the knowledge of what they
are trying to argue already in their minds. Reading in this way can cause you to skip over
gaps in your written argument because the gap-filler is in your head. A problem occurs
when your reader falls into these gaps. Your reader wants you to make the necessary
connections from one thought or sentence to the next. When you don’t, the reader can
become confused or frustrated. Think about when you read something and you struggle to
find the most important points or what the writer is trying to say. Isn’t that annoying?
Doesn’t it make you want to quit reading and surf the web or call a friend?
Putting yourself in the reader’s position
Instead of reading your draft as if you wrote it and know what you meant, try reading it as
if you have no previous knowledge of the material. Have you explained enough? Are the
connections clear? This can be hard to do at first. Consider using one of the following
strategies:
• Take a break from your work—go work out, take a nap, take a day off. This is why the
Writing Center and your instructors encourage you to start writing more than a day
before the paper is due. If you write the paper the night before it’s due, you make it
almost impossible to read the paper with a fresh eye.
• Try outlining after writing—after you have a draft, look at each paragraph separately.
Write down the main point for each paragraph on a separate sheet of paper, in the
order you have put them. Then look at your “outline”—does it reflect what you meant
to say, in a logical order? Are some paragraphs hard to reduce to one point? Why?
•
This technique will help you find places where you may have confused your reader
by straying from your original plan for the paper.
Read the paper aloud—we do this all the time at the Writing Center, and once you get
used to it, you’ll see that it helps you slow down and really consider how your reader
experiences your text. It will also help you catch a lot of sentence-level errors, such as
misspellings and missing words, which can make it difficult for your reader to focus
on your argument.
These techniques can help you read your paper in the same way your reader will and make
revisions that help your reader understand your argument. Then, when your instructor
finally reads your finished draft, he or she won’t have to fill in any gaps. The more work you
do, the less work your audience will have to do—and the more likely it is that your
instructor will follow and understand your argument.
1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/07/trial-by-fire
2. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/30/what-death-penalty-opponents-don-tget#.ow0tkt6aS
3. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/15/death-by-deadline-part-one#.PBbR8IUbM
4. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/16/death-by-deadline-part-two#.ZBfkwNCpm
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“We Need to Talk About an Injustice” by Stevenson (video) by Bryan Stevenson
What I learned as a Kid in Jail” by Nazario (video)

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