Knowing Your Audience by Writing for Yourself

-- By SidneyChiang - 18 Apr 2016

Who is an Audience?

Our discussions about the nature of a public speech or a law review article directed at law students seemed to parallel questions about audiences that I experienced in creative writing classes in high school. Whenever I would share a piece with the class, I always preferred to hear it from others first. I imagined that was the best way to transition from the understanding I had when writing, to hearing what others might take away. But I also felt that this process may have been more effective in principle than in practice, since I rarely heard anything that indicated something different than what it meant to me.

The notion of "knowing your audience" seems to be repeated to students as one of the hallmarks of effective writing -- both creative and analytical -- despite the fact that it is, of course, overly simplistic to suggest that, for any writing category or any given piece, that there exists some representative person who constitutes a singular audience.

But I found this difficulty of writing for multiple audiences present in other forms of writing as well. A personal essay may be a redundancy: an "essai," an "attempt" seems to suggest a personal undertaking and a personal understanding that indicates the essay was written for the writer himself. However, the public nature of a published essay -- sharing the ideas with the world -- may make it beyond merely a personal issue.

The question, it seems, is how justifiable it is to suggest that we write for an individual reader, a class of readers, a broader audience, or ourselves? I would suggest the better understanding is that the author writes primarily for one's self.

Social Incentives to Write for Yourself

One needs only to look to the current Presidential election to find the potential backlash that may come from (the appearance of) pandering to one's audience. The equivalent in a creative writing context -- even beyond some basic notion of politicians and speech-writing -- would be criticisms directed at artists who are seen as "selling-out": by seeming to turn to a different or broader audience rather than representing one's self, the artist seems inauthentic. In both these contexts, a group punishment mechanism incentivizes individuals to focus on some notion of themselves as the primary audience.

As Law Students

To us as law students, then, recognizing that there may be this strong societal force towards writing as a personal act helps to explain, to ease our conscience, or perhaps to justify a judge making decisions and writing based on his social preferences. From one perspective, at best the judge is writing both to justify his decisions to himself and to explain to future law students, lawyers, and judges the social conditions behind the decision.

This, however, may merely push the question from "To whom are judges writing?" to "Who are judges predicting will utilize the specific interpretive fictions developed either through society or within the culture of the law?" That is, insofar as there are common conventions that make their opinions understandable and useful, are they to be understood on a societal level or merely a group level, and how is the judge to know? (See Moglen & Pierce, 1208-09.)

It seems unlikely that a judge would expect the decisions to be understood by the broader public directly, especially given the broad reliance on experts to interpret and predict (cf. "sophisticated hardworking journalists . . . covering a very important and demanding beat"). Most people likely would not even be bothered to read judicial opinions to an extent that a reasonable judge would take into consideration when drafting an opinion. What's more, the problem is exacerbated when taking into account the nature of understanding and interpreting opinions and nuances within them. I would therefore argue that judges essentially only write for themselves, with the understanding that people who can think like them, given a common background and customs within the law, could understand what they have written. This could be one interpretation of what it means when a judge writes to justify his societal preferences under the guise of logic and of objectivity.

As Poets

This system of coating substance with a form that may be more easily interpreted in a given context seems to parallel a method of writing poetry suggested by Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town: for young poets, he suggests, "the fact that 'suicide' sounds like 'cascade' is infinitely more important than what is being said." (Although he acknowledges that "it isn't of course," he suggests that "if you think about it that way for the next twenty-five years you could be in pretty good shape.") Without suggesting that I was a good poet, I think the poems that I wrote that seemed most interesting to the class were poems where I grounded the words in certain sounds. (Following Hugo, who, at one point, notes of his word choice, "actually, I'm doing all this because I like 'l' sounds, 'silo' 'filled' 'girls' 'tall' 'metal' 'hollow.'") Poetry seems to be a prime subject for couching ideas that may be important to you in a vehicle that can be understood by your peers.

Conclusion

Knowing your audience, then, should maybe be understood as predicting who can understand the conventions that make up methods of interpretation. Thus writing can be both a clearly public activity while allowing the author to focus on his subjective and personal meaning, without compromising. Of course, each individual shapes and is shaped by society. Social psychology notes that even seemingly deeply personal decisions like suicide are greatly inherently interpersonal. But writing does not seem to be directed to the reasonably prudent student, even if it is done with the awareness of what that student might understand. The nature of an essay is to get my words on the page, rather than to get my words on the page.