Article Summary

The writer-reader (audience) relationship has been a debated topic since rhetoric was created. This specific relationship is quite intricate and hard to pin point and define. There have been many attempts to define what it is and how it should be dealt with. Maxine Hairston writes in A Contemporary Rhetoric states that a sure sense of one’s audience and the assumptions that can be made are critical. One should constantly keep in mind the audience so as to no write for oneself. One exercise that is given to students to practice audience awareness is to specifically assign a stereotypical audience and make the students write to them. This, according to Long, has two major flaws- the first being that this stereotyping would not be tolerated anywhere else and second is that there would be a lack of validity to the writing. What Long is purposing is that a definition of audience be made before. This focuses the reader before he actually becomes the audience. The next step is creating a new set of questions for the writer to use in the pre-write. Rather than beginning with the usual questions we have always asked ourselves, such as “who is my audience” we should ask questions like “who do I want my audience to be”, “what attitudes and actions are to be encouraged” and “what do I want to treat in detail”. By asking these questions and applying them to the writing, Long suggests that the role of writer shifts from detective to creator which is what a writer should be.