4.2 Defining and Researching Your Public Rhetorical Situation: Considering Audience, Purpose, Genre, and Context

Take a few minutes to brainstorm the components of the public rhetorical situation you have been considering in the last module. We’ve already begun to explore exigent issues, publics, and counterpublics. Now, it’s time to select a specific audience, define your purpose, select your public writing genre, and select the context for publication. Because these parts of your writing are connected, you may find it helpful to complete the following “Planning for Your Public Rhetorical Situation” activity, which prompts you to answer a series of questions about each aspect. Some of these questions have been adapted from Louise Dunlap’s “Audience Analysis Grid” (127).

Activity: Planning for Your Public Rhetorical Situation

A common challenge student writers face with public writing is thinking of the public as ambiguous. Writing studies researcher Christian Weisser advocates for students to “locate strong publics where their voices can lead to action,” so that public writing has a greater chance of leading to “significant, tangible, immediate results” (Weisser 109, 111). To locate suitable publics for your writing, you will need to narrow your options until you find the specific public or counterpublic communities that would be most receptive to your message. Begin that process by brainstorming specific kinds of readers who are impacted by or interested in your public issue. For example, you might consider demographic groups (e.g., age, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, and geographic location).

As you consider potential public audiences, try using your place of publication as a guide. For instance, if your final piece of public writing will be a Facebook post to your account, your audience will be defined by your Facebook friends. In that case, you might brainstorm a list of the publics and counterpublics that exist within your own set of friends. If you want to try to publish your writing as an op-ed in your school’s newspaper, your audience would be the students at your school and the diverse sets of peer groups they represent. As you make progress on selecting your issue or audience, consider how other components, like genre or place of publication, may afford new opportunities or present new constraints in how you compose your public writing.

One of our preferred ways to define a public audience is by selecting a specific person or organization. This approach takes away the guesswork of attempting to understand a large and complex group of people. You can and should “analyze your audience to learn where their views differ from yours,” contends Louise Dunlap in her book Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Social Change Writing; then, turn that audience analysis into a “communication strategy” (120). This becomes a bit easier when your audience is a specific person. Students in our classes have researched, written, and mailed letters to the university president, state and national representatives, directors of nonprofit organizations, celebrities, athletes, and CEOs of businesses—just to name a few single-person audiences.

Keep in mind that successfully meeting the needs of your audience may result in changes to the style, structure, and tone of your writing compared to the kind of writing you typically submit in college classes. Compared to lengthy research essays, most public writing genres should be concise, clear, and direct—free of jargon that would be unfamiliar to the audience. It would also be inappropriate to include parenthetical MLA citations or a “Works Cited” list for most public genres. To let your audiences know where you found your information, shift to using attributive tags, identifying sources by title, author, year of publication, and even place of publication within your writing. Finally, while the kind of peer-reviewed sources you typically use in college can provide good evidence in public writing, a compelling personal story may be more effective and convincing to some public audiences—a combination of personal evidence with research-based evidence can be ideal.