Audience

Below are three different versions of essentially the same passage, each designed to do something different, each aimed at a different audience, with different needs and expectations. Take a look.

1.Jerimiah was a bullfrog. Was a good friend of mine. I never understood a single word he said, but I a helped him drink his wine. He always had some mighty fine wine.

2. Jerimiah, although frustratingly enigmatic, won my heart with his warmth, hospitality, and excellent taste in wine. The fact that he was a bull frog rarely came up in conversation.

3. Rana catesbeiana, commonly referred to as the American Bull Frog, was the subject of experiments conducted in the 1960’s to test the effects of alcohol on indigenous wildlife. Researchers noted that alcohol impaired the frogs’ distinctive croak, rendering them all but mute. Researchers also noted the decided preference of one frog, who they named Jerimiah, for the finer vintages of red wine. These later results were not part of the published study.

Just as we change vocabulary, sentence length, rhetorical devices, and tone when we talk to the various people we encounter on a daily basis (friends, family, authority figures, children) we (should) also change these things when writing for different imagined audiences. Below are four passages, each originally aimed at a different group. First, identify that group. What are the cues in the writing that signal this to you? Next, rewrite the passage for two different audiences, doing whatever it takes to get your point across to your chosen readers.

1. Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white as snow. And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.
2. According to this post-modernist reading, MTV’s hodge-podge of borrowed images and reworked devices celebrated a refusal to make sense of the cultural environment, a willingness to blur boundaries between artistic categories. Pop art swallows high art, while the line between the advertisement and the program vanishes. MTV, these critics argue, is about style and sensation rather than meaning, about affect rather than cognition, about performance and spectacle rather than narrative.
3. Last night I woke up at 3:30 a.m. with a piercing pain in my abdomen, certain I had been infected by some sort of Peruvian parasite that was gnawing away at my small intestine. It felt like the Neptunes had remixed my digestive tract, severely pumping up the bass. Now, the details of my illness will not be discussed here as they are unappetizing. However, there was one upside to this tragedy: I was forced to spend several hours in my bathroom reading old issues of Entertainment Weekly, which inadvertently recalibrated my perception of existence.
4. All you people can't you see, can't you see, how your love's affecting our reality?
   Every time we're down, you can make it right, and that makes you larger than life.