SMARTHINKING Writer's Handbook

Chapter 2, Lesson 5

Writing to Multiple Audiences

Objective

In this lesson, you will learn how to analyze and address the needs of up to three audiences in a single essay or article by finding the common ground among them.

Introduction

Unless you're writing a paper for a single reader—for example, the professor in one of your classes— most writing is addressed to multiple audiences. Suppose you write an article or a letter to the editor to the college newspaper. The readers of that paper include your fellow students, faculty, college staff, and members of the local community. Moreover, each of these groups may include people of different ethnic backgrounds, genders, and ages. Every one of these groups could be considered a different audience. Your challenge as a writer is to create a piece that will speak to all the different audiences who might read your work.

Before You Begin to Write

Writing to multiple audiences requires that before you begin to write, you first know who your audiences are, and how those different audiences affect your purpose for writing and your writing process. If you don't know how to do this, pause now and review the material in the lessons "Who Cares About the Audience" and "How the Audience Affects Purpose for Writing." In those topics you'll learn to identify audiences, get to know their needs and interests, and gain some insight into how to address each audience separately.

Now we'll consider how to address multiple audiences in one piece of writing.

Exercise

Using the example of arguing for a homeless shelter, assume that a committee has been created to research the proposal. Your audience for this proposal is the student body, the college administration, and various community leaders. The committee has ten members taken from each group: the Student Body President and Vice-President, the Dean of Students, the President of your college, the Dean of Faculty, the Dean of Finance, the town Mayor, and three members of the Town Council. They have asked you to redraft your proposal and submit it two weeks prior to the committee's first public meeting. Their request forces you to address them together, but you must effectively meet each of their needs and interests in one shot. How can you succeed?

How would you approach this situation? The following multiple-choice questions provide you with some alternative solutions for approaching multiple audiences. Choose the solution that you think would solve the problem:

1. Which audience would be the most important one to address?

A. Student body representatives
B. College representatives
C. Community leaders
D. None of the members is important by him/herself.
E. All of the members of the committee are important, but for different reasons.

2. How would you address the committee as an audience?

A. I would write to them in an informal voice.
B. I would write to them in a formal academic voice.
C. I would write to them using an appropriately formal voice, but would use examples and details that would interest all of the committee members.
D. I would write to them using a blend of informal and formal voices.
E. I would write three different proposals (one for each audience).

3. How could you address all of the audiences at once?

A. I'd blow off two of the audiences and write to the one with the most power over the situation.
B. I'd divide the proposal into three sections—one for each audience.
C. I'd write one proposal that address the needs and interests of all of the audiences without splitting it up into individual sections.
D. I wouldn't write to them at all. It's not possible to write to them and be effective.

4. How could you meet the needs of all of the audiences in one letter?

A. Since the student body representatives have the least say, and since they are least knowledgeable of the situation, I will address them because the other members will understand what I am trying to say.
B. I know that I can't meet everyone's needs, so I'm not going to write the proposal.
C. I could find common needs and interests so I could appeal to everyone on the committee.
D. I could break my proposal into several parts that individually meet the needs for different audiences.

Keep your answers in mind while you read through the remainder of this chapter. After you have finished reading, how would you approach the proposal differently?

First Things First

The first step in addressing multiple audiences is to recognize that you will be addressing several audiences on many occasions. The second step, then, is to identify each of the audiences to whom you will be writing. To do this, you must understand your subject well enough to know who will be interested in reading what you have to say. Sometimes, as with the homeless shelter committee, this step is done for you because the situation dictates your audience. However, on other occasions you will have an opportunity to pick and choose to whom you want to speak.

Once you have identified your audiences, you should then analyze each audience (see the lesson "Analyzing the Audience" for detailed information.)

Exercise

In order to understand your different audiences, you should take a few moments to write down as much as you can about each before you start to write. In the following text box, write some information about each audience on the homeless shelter committee. You would use this information to plan your essay/letter to the committee. Once you have identified and explored each audience, you will then be ready to move into the planning and writing stages.

Finding Common Ground

You have identified the three audiences on the committee and you have listed some of their concerns, needs, and values, and interests. Each audience is important, but they have different levels of power. Since they have different abilities to implement the proposal, as well as different needs, values, and interests, how do you address them? The best way to reach a multiple audience is to find common ground and present your best reasons from these common points.

Exercise

In the text box below, list the commonalties of the three audiences on the committee. Click the Compare button to see another possible solution.

Using your list of commonalities that you have discovered among the student body, college administration, and community leaders, determine which items you think represent the strongest common ground. For example, an argument built on the fact that everyone at the meeting either wants or needs to be there may not be very strong after all—college administrators and community leaders attend many meetings and may feel somewhat annoyed at needing to attend this one. A stronger commonality probably is the human nature of the group. Since they each recognize that the homeless are people and that people need shelter, food, and clothes, an argument that primarily addresses the common humanness of the audience and of the homeless represents a more powerful beginning.

After determining which commonality is potentially the strongest, then you can list the others in order of importance for developing your argument. For instance, once you know that everyone sees the human nature of the homelessness problem, you need to determine whether each potential audience member feels similarly toward how to resolve that problem. Students might be a bit more idealistic and want to help simply because they think it is the right thing to do. But the school administrators, however they might feel about homeless people being human, may have genuine concerns about public relations and probably feel responsible to the parents of the students. Likewise, the community leaders might have in mind not only the potential for bad or good press based on building a homeless shelter, but also a concern about where the money comes from.

Finding common ground, as we have here, gives you the opportunity to think about the strongest commonalities from which to build an argument. It gives you an extra advantage, however. Knowing where your multiple audiences most likely agree will guide you to understanding where they most likely will disagree. It is your job to start from points of agreement and then address the points of disagreement, called counter-arguments (explored further in the lesson "Writing to Persuade"). As you can see, addressing multiple audiences requires that you look at the people who you are addressing both as a whole and as separate interest groups. Once you do this background work, you are in a better position to decide the strongest common ground from which to begin your argument planning.

Summary

Most arguments that you write will be addressed to multiple audiences. In order to do this well, you need to analyze those audiences and find the common ground on which you can approach them. Finding the common ground leads to understanding where the audiences differ and the main points that you will need to present in the argument will develop from your audience analysis.