3.4 Engaging Realistic Publics: Preliminary Research and Planning

Engaging Realistic Publics: Preliminary Research and Planning

The complexity of the rhetorical situation can make it difficult to discover your issue and define the exigence. To do this, you’ll need to consider components like audience and genre. As you narrow your public issue and consider its relevance, you should also begin thinking about who you will write to and what form your writing will take. This section provides strategies for how to research possibilities for your public rhetorical situation by understanding which publics you are addressing.

When you think about the audience for a piece of public writing, what first comes to mind? Easy—“the general public,” right? The general public can be the intended audience for writing that is meant for someone other than oneself (e.g., a personal journal) or a teacher (e.g., class assignments). Everything else tends to be lumped in with the general public, like readers of a newspaper or your Instagram followers. Here’s the problem: there’s really no such thing as the general public. In fact, the examples of audiences above should already suggest to you that each of those groups has a set of distinct characteristics, even if newspaper readers and your Instagram followers share some things in common. The kinds of evidence and emotional appeals that are effective are heavily impacted by your chosen audience. Writing for a broad, generic audience is extremely challenging and unlikely to win many over. To demonstrate this point, let’s take a moment to frame the significance of “publics” and the public sphere.

Researchers who study and write about the public sphere—the space where the general public comes together to discuss, write about, and debate issues they have in common—help us understand how we can be more effective public writers. For example, Jürgen Habermas conceived of the public sphere as an idealized space accessible to all. Habermas examined how people in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came together in places like Britain’s coffee houses and France’s salons to debate civic issues. This marked a shift from the typically personal or private conversations people had in their homes. While Habermas’s conception of the public sphere was foundational, his work has been criticized for being overly idealized. If you were not a white male with property, you were not able to participate in civic debates in the public sphere.

Nancy Fraser and others have argued for a more nuanced conception of publics—yes, the “s” in “publics” is important. Fraser studied “counterpublics”; historically, these were public spheres that existed alongside coffeehouses and salons. Counterpublic gatherings and clubs gave opportunities for women, working-class people, and others who didn’t have privilege and were excluded from dominant public spheres, to develop “alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech” (Fraser 62). The takeaway here is that to conceive of a homogenous public sphere—or the general public—is inaccurate; there is a “plurality of competing publics” and counterpublics (Fraser 61). Take a minute to think about the different public and counterpublic spheres in your own life: where do your family, friends, or community groups gather? What do you talk about? Are there some topics that are taboo or off-limits? Are there certain styles or ways of speaking that you use with those groups? Your answers probably vary depending on which public or counterpublic sphere you are envisioning. Recognizing a multiplicity of publics means acknowledging and valuing the ways our differences can challenge us to alter and expand our views of the world around us.