Audience
Golden, Berquist, and Coleman begin their process of adopting rhetorical stance with an analysis of the audience. Successful authors and speakers utilize their knowledge of their audience so that the audience believes they are motivated to the author’s purpose by their own agency (see Campbell and Hugh Blair). The author creates this impression by demonstrating an understanding of her audience’s needs and by “substantiating”, according to Kenneth Burke, intellectual and empathetic relationships between herself and her audience. Plato’s “noble aims” of rhetoric require the author to strive for a moral elevation of both author and audience; Aristotle and Cicero emphasized the consideration of human nature and emotion in the successful understanding of one’s audience and the establishment of the relationships necessary for achieving persuasion.
Read more about this topic: Rhetorical Stance
Famous quotes containing the word audience:
“Growing has no connection with audience. / Audience has no
connection with identity. / Identity has no
connection with a universe. / A universe has no
connection with human nature.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favor with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of “quaint,” and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)