Project 2 Mafer C

Introduction

Audience goes beyond being only a group of spectators; audience is the persons that show interest, support and enthusiasm to the writer. For this research project my interest is based on the audience and the relation between it and the topic that the author is discussing. Does every topic has its own audience or is it universal? For me, it depends on the topic; some topics are universal because we are all concerned about them but others are for a specific audience. To prove this theory, the article “Do I Write for an Audience?” written by the author Iser Wolfgang serves as an excellent example because it explains in detail who do we write for. Another great article that talks about audience and its significance is “The Meanings of Audience” by Douglas Park which primary explains the difficulty to define a real audience; and last but not least, the other source that I’m going to use is the article “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re) Envisioning “First Year Composition” as Introduction to Writing Studies” by the authors Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle who discussed the existence of a universal way of writing. All of the authors discussed the role and the importance of an audience and the response that the writer gets from it; finally to back up my theory I'm going to apply some surveys to my classmates and make some interviews to other college students to see what the majority of them think about it. After all, "The Audience is the best judge of anything." (Barbra Streisand)

Literature Review

Iser Wolfgang says that every time a writer works on a book, a research paper, an essay, a novel or even a class paper is faced with the question: “Who am I writing for?” and even though sometimes we think we don’t have a specific audience, we will have always someone that will read it. He mainly discussed the situation that the author’s face, do the readership set the guidelines or does the author only writes to communicate something to its readers? Like Wolfgang, Douglas Park marks the audience as a crucial and important part of writing. Besides being really difficult to define an audience, Park suggests that instead of focusing only on the audience, authors need to pay more attention to their pieces of writing and to make sure they are communicating its real message. On the other hand, Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle deal with the assumption that writing is universal; they agree that in order to have a meaningful piece of writing authors need to cover some writing basis and make sure they are clear on what they are talking about but they totally disagree on the premise that writing can be considered independent of content.

Connection Piece

The three articles that I’ve chosen to support my theory mainly discussed the relation between the author and the audience. I really like the way each author discussed its own ideas and I got to see that these three articles are all connected. Starting with Wolfgang and the question, who do we write for? I realize that not only real writers but everybody at least once in their life is face with this question. Passing to Douglas Park and his suggestion of stop worrying that much on the audience and start giving more attention to your topic and main idea, we get to see that both authors are correct because if someone writes something it’s because he/she want to share or to expressed something Writers need to have a balance here because each side its equally important but if they focused only on the audience they are not going to give the adequate importance to what they are trying to communicate and vice versa.  And finally, to make a paper work, creators need to understand that content its part of writing, as Downs and Wardle say on its article.

Methodology

To make a better research project and to have more proves to support my theory; I’m going to apply some surveys to my classmates and to interview other college students. The reason why I chose these two it’s because I considered it very efficient and I can take percentages from the surveys and see really what other students think about this relation between the audiences and the authors. On the other hand, with the interviews I’ll get more detail answers that will help me see if they really agree with my theory and if not to see other points of view.