Paper Assignment #2: The Secret Process of Inventing an Audience
We have seen how Plato, one of the most capable people ever to have lived, saw rhetoric – and it wasn’t flattering. For him, using rhetoric in writing was almost criminal. It could only mislead people. Writing is “like a painting” which can’t match the needs of the viewer or reader: it just repeats itself, saying the same thing every time, every time, every time.
For Plato, rhetoric might have some limited use as a dry set of rules for organizing a speech. If you know an individual’s soul, you might legitimately use rhetoric to match your words to “hit home” with your listener one-on-one. Rhetoric for Plato was all about F2F real-time evangelism. Rhetoric (according to him) had almost nothing to do with groups of people. It wasn’t about sharing leadership (as in a democracy), achieving justice (as in a court case), or playing with possible, unproven ideas (as in natural science or poetry).
So here we are, sitting down with a niche magazine, full of pictures and writing, that represents a particular “forum” as James Porter calls it. This forum is very powerful. It is a “discourse community,” a set of assumptions, phrases, questions, and the like. A discourse community dismisses (or ignores) what’s “weird” and celebrates what’s “normal.” A magazine, as a mini-discourse community, gives community members images of themselves. It tells you how to feel, act, and understand things.
Ede and Lunsford saw how this works they said to be a writer was to be part of a discourse community. They said it’s dynamic, a very back-and-forth sort of thing. Ede and Lunsford said that it’s way too simplistic to say that there is an audience “out there” – an audience that just sits around, waiting to read your words. You as a writer make the audience up in you head: audience “is a construction of the writer, a created fiction.” But your audience is not just a daydream. You make this world out of sentences and paragraphs. It’s hard! Writers create a little world for the reader by intentionally choosing to use style and references, and invite the reader to jump on board. As Ede and Lunsford put it, “The writer uses the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader -- cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text" Ede and Lunsford, "Audience Addressed / Audience Invoked" (160).
Forums in part invent their audiences. Members of a forum do this invention it in their head while they’re writing, making a mental image of the readers; they also do it on paper by using their style to open up a space for the reader to inhabit. When you finally find yourself “inside” a discourse community, you’re there because you’ve learned how to respond to the cues that the community gives you. Nothing seems strange anymore (except the stupid and “weird” stuff you and your community rejects). All around you are your people and you’re one of them. At that point, you’ve been trained by the community to inhabit the conversations. You have learned to believe that the topics and style and habits of the community are valuable. You are a “handy man” or a “Cosmo girl” or a “medical doctor” or “completely Mad.”
Our paper is a rhetorical analysis of a forum (your magazine). The problem we face is this: From the outside, this forum seems to be addressing a set of people who are already interested in a certain subject. Looking closer, however, you start to notice how cleverly the forum creates a “virtual world” or “discourse community” for readers to enter and call their own. Though the discourse community seems natural, it’s in fact a careful stage set, a construction. Paper topic: How does the forum make itself appear to be natural and normal? What does it do to get people to become “insiders” to this discourse community?
