I’ve published 9 blog posts and over 80 pages on this site to date. In trying to build the site, I’ve faced numerous obstacles, but one in particular has got me vexed: I don’t know my audience.
Actually, I have several ideas of who they might be. But that’s part of the problem. In imagining different audiences, I’m feeling the constraints imposed by differing discourses.
Writerly audiences are a diverse bunch with interests and concerns based on different professional contexts, numerous disciplines and sub-disciplines. Each has its own discourse.
The following is just a short list of discourse communities that have come to mind as I’ve written on this site:
- Academic writers
- Scholarly writers
- Teachers of writing
- Bloggers (writers who enact, analyze, or share blogging strategies)
- Content writers and strategists
- Freelance writers
- Fiction writers
- Technical writers
- Professional writers (writers who work for companies and organizations)
- Language enthusiasts
These groups can be segmented into even smaller discourse communities, and on top of that, there is considerable overlap. For example, some freelance writers specialize in technical writing. Fiction writers run blogs. Teachers of writing are in many ways content strategists.
I suppose the smart thing to do would be to niche down, really get a handle on a target audience, keep in line with the marketer’s adage that if you speak to everyone, you’ll speak to no one.
All I would need to do is choose one of these groups as my target audience and appeal to their needs and interests, using their discourse—speak to them in their language. Not a terribly difficult concept.
But here’s the thing.
Choosing a target audience—choosing a discourse or manner of speaking—also means choosing an identity. It means becoming a particular type of person by virtue of the language I use, the style I employ. And what makes me so cautious is that it’s not like you can just pick a persona—rather, a persona develops through language, and it’s not always easy to see who you are becoming during the becoming.
Here’s the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall:
we…occupy our identities very retrospectively: having produced them, we then know who we are. We say, “Oh that’s where I am in relation to this argument and for these reasons.” So, it’s exactly the reverse of what I think is the common sense way of understanding it, which is that we already know our “self” and then put it out there. Rather, having put it into play in language, we then discover what we are. I think that only then do we make an investment in it, saying, “Yes, I like that position, I am that sort of person, I’m willing to occupy that position.
What if I’m not willing to occupy that position? I think that’s what’s making me tense up. Looking at some of my earlier posts, I already wonder if I’m adopting too uncritical a position. One response would be to try refer to more scholarly sources in my posts.
But if I do that too much, I’ll lose certain readers who I’m not sure I want to lose. I’ll sound Academic. There’s nothing wrong with sounding academic, but I’m not an academic, in the technical sense.
I work a full-time office job and teach English composition as an adjunct instructor. I like to read scholarship in the composition and rhetoric field.
I also like to read popular writing books and grammar books (even though I know grammar by itself doesn’t really improve writing) and practical-to-a-fault blogs about blogging.
Sometimes I feel like talking about writing from an academic perspective. Sometimes I feel like talking about blogging from an economic perspective. Sometimes I just like being silly.
I don’t want to be locked in; I don’t want to be overly constrained. But it’s inevitable. At some point, I need to be able to define the audience I am writing for; otherwise, I won’t resonate with anyone. (There’s a reason that blogs which ramble about random, disconnected topics often fail to find an audience). Targeting an audience and writing to them is the only way to see if I like the “sort of person” I become.
An Outdated Conception of Audience
So yes, I will have to choose an audience to target when I publish blog posts. But I think I might alleviate my fears by changing my conception of audience.
Audiences are traditionally thought of in two ways. These two types of audiences were brilliantly described by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford as (1) audience addressed and (2) audience invoked.
Audience addressed is what we think of when we do tangible audience analysis, like demographic research, polling, interviewing, and (increasingly) data analysis (e.g., Google analytics and keyword research tools). Such analysis allows us to make good guesses about how to adapt our language to suit the audience—it helps us know what to say and how to say it.
Audience invoked, introduced by Walter Ong, refers to the role we imagine audiences will accept when reading our work. We provide cues in our language and the reader acts on these cues, or they don’t. This is simplifying it, but when I write a practical post, I am imagining an audience that will accept the role as learner of a specific subject, such as blogging. I provide cues in the language that I imagine the reader will identify with. And hopefully readers adopt, in their own imagination, a reading role they feel is commensurate with their values and interests.
Ede and Lunsford’s excellent conclusion is that writers must constantly navigate between these two conceptions of audience; they don’t exist independent of one another. Audience invoked is tested by audience addressed which then leads us to a revised invocation of the audience. For example, I imagine that my blog post will appeal to a target reader (audience invoked); actual readers read the blog post and give me feedback (audience addressed). I could then revise or update the blog post, or I could begin to change the way I write future blog posts.
During these transactions, the reader challenges the writer, and the writer can challenge the reader. This is a very helpful construction in thinking about an audience.
But I’m not sure it entirely accounts for what happens with online audiences. With online audiences, personal connection has tremendous significance. People tend to gravitate to other people, to their ideas yes, but also to their personality or their ethos. Audiences become followers, subscribers, fans, or members of a tribe, as it’s commonly put in blogging circles.
Audiences like these tend to stick around with the writer as she evolves, through changes in focus, style, and sometimes even values. The audience become part of the journey.
What’s interesting is that these personal connections are not always positive connections, as audiences often become subscribers or followers of people they vehemently disagree with or sometimes outright dislike. Why be a part of such a person’s audience? Maybe to keep tabs on opposing viewpoints. Maybe for entertainment purposes. I admit I follow a certain politician on Twitter whom I vehemently disagree with. Partly this is to stay informed, partly it’s because the absurdity makes me laugh (sometimes).
What do you call this type of audience? Audience Constructed? Audience Articulated?
Thinking about audiences in this way gives me confidence that through blogging I’ll gradually come to know who my audience is—and who I am.
(I found the Stuart Hall quotation in the article “Becoming a Writerly Self:” by Juanita Rodger Comfort.)
If anyone knows of a good scholarly source that addresses online audiences, please let me know in the comments below. Thanks.