Audience

Audience Balance

        As we talked about on Tuesday, I'd like to take a look back at what audience means to me and how I think it affects my field. As a TCR Master's student I'm told all the time that what I write and who I write to are tangible things. However, in the past few weeks I've had to reconcile my differences with audience as opposed to the standard view of TCR. Ong talks about the fictionalized audience that is created whenever a writer writes. He is specifically targeting those who write creatively, however, it definitely ties in to TCR. We think, as TCR people, that we are always writing to the real people who read our manuals, sites, etc. But do we know them personally? Can we accurately predict all of those people who will use our documents? The answer is no. We can, to some extent, gather date on who we are going to be writing to, but we cannot pinpoint our audience as a whole. This idea that we have to invoke and also address our audience is the key in making our field more accessible and more practical than it already is. Without striking a balance between the tangible and invoked we, as instructors and scholars, cannot actively participate in a discourse in or out of the classroom. To some extent, we all have to come to terms with the fact that we will have to generalize our audience to some extent and hope that our point comes across in the writing that we wish to make.