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:
“The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.”
—Alfred Jarry (1873–1907)
“Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record.”
—Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl Rosebery (1847–1929)
“An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark—that is critical genius.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)