ABSTRACT
Aristotle and other ancients, such as Cicero, saw major differences between audiences based on factors like age, emotion, rationality, social status, past experience, education, and values. The ability to anticipate an audience’s knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases involves a good deal of detective work that won’t happen if we assume the audience is “everyone.” Newspapers, in fact, are a great starting point for helping students learn about nuances in audience. A quick scan of the comments section after an article in the online edition of a newspaper illustrates the potential dangers. Newspaper websites can also provide important information about what an audience is looking for. The importance of audience is a key difference between a traditional literary approach to texts and a rhetorical approach. One way to help students see differences between kinds of audiences is to take a message intended for one recipient and rewrite it to suit a different reader and context.
