by Sarah Stanley

Goal: To understand how different audiences of the same text will and do create different meanings, which often reflect an audience’s (a reader’s) situated use of the text. Such understanding encourages us as writers and readers to consider audience.

  1. Gather six types of “texts” in various mediums for class. I used a fortune cookie fortune, Moulin Rouge the dvd, a bus ticket stub, the main page of CNN.com, a series of conversational emails, a New Yorker cartoon, and an I-tunes printout of a Coldplay live show. I chose these texts because I had encountered them within a few days of each other and wanted to use my own recent textual experiences for the audience analysis.
  2. Ask the class to form groups of four. Tell all the groups that they will be given a series of texts and for each text to brainstorm a list of all the possible audiences for the text. Encourage them that the goal is to generate as many as possible. Give each group at least 3 minutes with each text. I got some exercise during this time, facilitating the “switch” between group to group of the texts.
  3. After each group has their lists of each text, start the text rotation again with each group. Ask them this time to pick out one particular audience on their generated list for the text under discussion. Then, have them brainstorm two more lists of what that particular audience would notice/use/ think about regarding the text and what this same audience would not notice/use/think about regarding the text. About 3 minutes is plenty of time.
  4. Spend the last ten minutes of the class (or if you have more than that, consider yourself very lucky) with each group sharing what they came up with for each text. For example, one of the possible audiences a group came up with for the Moulin Rouge dvd was a teenage drug user who would be using the texts to hide their stash of drugs from parental eyes. The audience of the text then would be interested in how the movie was perceived, a “harmless musical” rather than the soon-to-be professional singer who was watching it for tips (another group’s idea for a possible audience).