This comic strip is cute and humorous, but it also makes a very important point about any situation in which the intent is to convince someone to perform some action. You should know what appeals to and motivates your audience before you approach them with a suggestion for action. The same point is also true for writers. The writer must have a good idea of who the audience is and what motivates them in order to create arguments that will convince his or her audience to not only to read the text, but also to behave in the desired fashion after they have read the text.

Carolyn Miller says, "If audience adaptation is to be central to technical writing, we need broader and more flexible methods which permit analysis of the relationship between the writer and the reader" (615). Her call for additional methods of audience analysis is echoed in the realm of Instructional Design. Instructional designers, who create written materials used to train others on technical subjects such as equipment and network descriptions and troubleshooting methods and skills, currently have a very meager toolbox of methods with which to define and analyze their audience. Perhaps rhetorical theorists can provide to instructional designers additional audience analysis suggestions for writing to their audience. This paper will explore the works of several writers who address the issue of audience analysis and motivation, and identify to what extent they can provide appropriate models to be used in the instructional design process as well. I will review several different articles that propose very different methods of examining and motivating audiences and discuss their possible implications for use in the realm of instructional design. These articles include the work of Fred R. Pfister and Joanne F. Petrick, Walker Gibson, Walter J. Ong, Russell C. Long, Douglas B. Park, and David Goodwin.

In the field of instructional design, audience analysis is usually referred to as "learner assessment", "learner analysis", or "target population description." In their textbook, Mastering the Instructional Design Process, Rothwell and Kazanas (1998) state that, "Learner assessment addresses the following deceptively simple question: Who is the intended and appropriate learner? The answer to this question helps define the target population, target group, or target audience" (100). Instructional designers are told to pay attention to the typical learner rather than attempt to identify all possible learners. In Making Instruction Work (1997), leading instructional design writer, Robert F. Mager, suggests looking at several learner characteristics. These characteristics include: age range, gender distribution, marital and family status, learner interests, reasons for taking the course, possible attitudes and biases, need-gratifiers (what is perceived as rewarding), reading ability, physical characteristics and previous experience in the subject matter (94-95). Mager further asserts that,

Target population information not only will help reveal a useful starting point; it will help to shape the course itself. It will help determine which examples are most likely to fit, what vocabulary to use, and even what media and procedures to adopt. For example, if you learn that your students are active people, you don't want to make them sit passively for long periods of time. (92)

While this type of audience analysis is useful and important, ideas in audience or "reader" analysis from outside the instructional design discourse community may have some helpful insights to offer to that field.

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford in "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy," (1984) create a distinction between two types of audience analysis. They call these two competing theories "audience addressed" and "audience invoked" (156).

Ede and Lunsford assert, "Those who envision audience as addressed emphasize the concrete reality of the writer's audience; they also share the assumption that knowledge of this audience's attitudes, beliefs and expectations is not only possible (via observation and analysis) but essential" (156). On the other hand, audience invoked proponents consider that a text's audience, "is a construction of the writer, a created fiction . . . The writer uses the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader'cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text" (160).

Clearly, the audience analysis method behind the instructional design model of learner analysis is based on the audience addressed method as opposed to the audience invoked method.

Some rhetoricians have focused on improving the audience addressed method. For example, Fred R. Pfister and Joanne F. Petrick in "A Heuristic Model for Creating a Writer's Audience," (1980) advocate use of a procedural model in creating an audience. While their model has much in common with the instructional design method of audience analysis, it adds other levels of analysis than just audience characteristics. Pfister and Petrick's model relies on two assumptions. The first assumption is that the writing process involves the writer, the subject, the reader, and the style of the text. Second, the writer must understand each component and how that component relates to the other three components. The model forces the writer to do this by having her examine the environment of the audience (Audience/Self), the subject as interpreted by the audience (Audience/Subject), the relationship between the audience and the writer (Audience/Writer), and best methods required to achieve cooperation, persuasion and identification with the audience (Audience/Form) (214, 216).

Each factor has several questions that need to be addressed by the writer. For example, the Audience/Self factor asks what is the audience member's physical, social or economic status. The Audience/Subject component asks what is the opinion of the reader on the subject. The Audience/Writer asks what the writer's purpose is in addressing the audience. The Audience/Form asks what pattern, mode or development is appropriate. The writer must answer as many of these questions as possible about the audience in order to write effectively for that audience. In doing this, she puts together a profile of the audience to use as she writes.

Obviously, Pfister and Petrick's heuristic has a lot in common with the instructional design learner analysis method in the Audience/Self, Audience/Subject and Audience/Form concept, but it goes further by adding consideration of the Audience/Writer relationship. Writers should now also consider what the reader's attitude is about them, what experiences the reader may share with them, and what the role is they want the audience to assume in the text. For example, if one of the things that an instructional designer thinks her learner believes about her is that she is detail-oriented (a common hiring requirement for an instructional designer), then the instructional designer must write her document so that she bolsters that reader belief.

However, additional audience addressed methods such as that described by Pfister and Petrick do not supply the instructional designer with any revolutionary ways to view his audience. It is merely another "tried and true" audience addressed approach. I would argue that instructional design methods are already so heavily invested in the audience addressed approach, that additional models based on this same idea hold no promise for radically reconceptualizing audience and audience motivation. If the instructional designer of technical training materials is to truly attempt a new and fresh way of defining audience, then he must examine the audience invoked approaches more closely. These models provide very different and exciting ways to think about an audience.

Walker Gibson in his article "Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers," (1950) considers the importance of the "real reader" versus the "mock reader." Gibson's reader is the physical person reading the text; the mock reader is defined by the persona and attitudes that the reader must adopt in order to fully jump into the role presented in the text. It is the "mask and costume the individual takes on in order to experience the language" (2). The author creates the mock reader by the tone and language that he or she uses in writing the text. According to Gibson, the writer must pay careful attention to the mock reader role because if the real reader cannot identify with the mock reader, then he or she will not read the material. "We [as mock readers] assume, for the sake of the experience, that set of attitudes and qualities which the language asks us to assume, and, if we cannot assume them, we throw the book away" (1).

Gibson's idea of the real versus mock reader provides some very useful insight to the instructional designer. The instructional designer may believe that in doing his detailed learner analysis discussed earlier that he has uncovered all relevant information to be known about his target audience. However, in doing so, he has only paid attention to the real reader, not the mock reader. All that effort on collecting audience data is thrown away, if the instructional designer creates a mock reader role that insults, offends or somehow "turns off" his audience. One way he could fall into this trap is by writing the documentation using a patronizing tone. He could assume that his audience desires the role of a beginning learner to be led step by step through a new process, when in fact they may not want to adopt that reader role at all. Instead they want to be cast in a more sophisticated and knowledgeable role. The Instructional designer should construct a mock reader role that is appealing to the target audience by defining in his text what role he believes the audience desires to be cast in to approach the material.

Many writing theorists quote Walter J. Ong and his article "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," (1975) as support for their own theories. So Ong is a useful theorist to examine next. Ong suggests that there seldom is a clearly definable body of readers out there that the writer can keep in mind as they create their text. Instead, the writer must "fictionalize" his or her audience by imagining them in the role they must play as they read the text. Ong says:

What do we mean by saying the audience is a fiction? Two things at least. First, the writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role . . . Second, we mean that the audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself. A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with this role in the rest of life. (12)

Ong looks at methods used by past authors to convey the audience's role and suggests that beginning writers would do well to imitate many of these methods. Success for the writer is characterized by the ability to choose the proper fictionalized audience to address.

Applying Ong's idea of fictionalizing the audience to instructional design would suggest that an option in audience analysis would then be to look at previous successful training documents. These documents would be examined with an eye towards the techniques used by those authors to signal to the training audience the role that they are asked to play in the document. The instructional designer would then imitate that previously successful role in subsequent training materials.

Russell C. Long examines in "Writer-Audience Relationships: Analysis or Invention?" (1980) historical perspectives on writing and claims that "all organized or prepared uses of language were either persuasive (rhetoric) or aesthetic (poetic). Traditional rhetoric, then, intended to present a systematic study of a pragmatic approach to persuasion" (222). Long claims that the persuasive perspective of rhetoric assumes that there is a combative relationship between the reader and writer. The writer must convince the reader to change his mind about the subject at hand and the reader does not necessarily want to have his mind changed.

That persuasion was seen as possible . . . implies that the more precise the writer's knowledge of his adversary's likes, dislikes, predispositions, strengths and weaknesses, the more likely that his attempts at persuasion will be successful. It is upon the acquisition of this knowledge, and upon the concomitant assumption of the adversary, or agonistic, relationship between writer and reader that most treatments of the writer-reader relationships in modern textbooks are based. (222)

Long criticizes the historical approach for two reasons: first, because traditional audience analysis techniques that evolve from this viewpoint lead to simplistic stereotyping of audiences; and secondly, because it assumes that the relationship between writer and reader is combative (223). Long then draws on the work of Walter J. Ong to assert that the relationship between writer and reader can be creative, not just agonistic (224). "If audience is a created fiction, then an analysis of its traits becomes possible only as the writer defines his purpose and decides upon desirable reader characteristics" (225).

Long reasserts Ong's premise that the writer must create a satisfactory role for the audience to play in the text. He further suggests that instead of the writer asking whom his audience is, he should ask whom he wants them to be. Create the audience first, and then write to that audience.

What attitudes, ideas, actions are to be encouraged . . .[w]hat distance between reader and subject should be established. What of diction and the creation of tone? What pieces of information do I want the reader to take for granted? Which do I want to treat in detail and emphasis? Such questions shift the burden of responsibility upon the writer from that of amateur detective to that of creator, and the role of creator is the most important and most basic the writer must play. (225-226)

Long's suggestions are tricky for the instructional designer to incorporate if there is a specific audience being addressed in the training. It is not advantageous to disregard important information about a specific audience if it is available and does not lead to irresponsible stereotyping of the audience. Indeed, Long has been criticized by Walter S. Minot (1986) who asserts that the same audience can be both addressed and invented (335). However, in some instances the instructional designer is asked to create material for an unspecified audience. In this case, he would have to create the audience and their characteristics and then write to those characteristics. This type of treatment for audience analysis would work well for technical systems training which is delivered to many different audiences all with different skill levels. The instructional designer must first decide who his audience is for the training document, what skills they would have, what attitudes they have about the system itself and processes they must perform in the system, and would then write the text with that audience in mind. For example, the instructional designer must write a document describing some new, long-awaited functionality which is being added to an existing system. He envisions that the typical audience member has been frustrated with this system in the past because it didn't perform adequately. Therefore he envisions them to be skeptical that the new enhancements will help them. Having decided what characteristics describe a "skeptical" person, he can now go about crafting a document which addresses the concerns of that audience.

Douglas B. Park in "Analyzing Audiences," (1986) places a social constuctionist emphasis on audience analysis. He asserts that an audience can only exist when three conditions exist. First, that there is an established social setting such as a social institution or club. Second, that there is understanding that discourse performs some function within that social setting. Finally, that there is some physical setting for the audience to assemble in. In text publications, this would be the means of distribution of the text (482-483). Knowing how these conditions are defined for a particular audience will help the writer "grasp a wealth of tacit and explicit knowledge about the form of the discourse and the way the subject can be treated" (483).

Park develops a framework of questions that can help the writer evaluate the social environment for which she is writing. These questions include: What is the social relationship between writer and audience that the text serves? How does the text serve in that relationship? How does the text get distributed to the audience and what formats must be applied to the text for that social setting? What is known or assumed about the audience in terms of existing attitudes or knowledge about the subject that must be addressed in the text? How much are these attitudes affected by the audience being part of a particular social institution (484)?

According to Park, "To identify an audience means identifying a situation. So the primary issue that our current concern with audience analysis poses for teachers of writing is not how we can help students analyze their audiences but, first, how and to what extent we can help them define situations for their writing" (486). Therefore, if the writer cannot adequately define the social situation, then the writing will not have the desired impact on the audience.

Park's suggestions would be very useful to incorporate into instructional design practices. All training takes place in a social environment, whether it is a particular company or a group of web designers coming together to learn a software program. These social environments have their own unwritten rules about how and when discourse takes place between members and what format the discourse should be in. In the case of training materials, most organizations assume at a minimum that the training will take place in a designated location, will incorporate paper-based materials, electronic materials, or both, and will have some sort of trainer leading the session. The instructional designer must take a group's particular social requirements into account when she writes material for that group. Otherwise she risks alienating the audience.

David Goodwin, in "Emplotting the Reader: Motivation and Technical Documentation," (1991), asserts that the writer must not only create a role for his reader, but must "emplot the reader [by] creat[ing] an action-oriented role within a storyline that transforms the reader from a hesitant, if not reluctant, neophyte, into a competent software user" (99-100). Goodwin writes that the goal of most technical writing is to keep the audience reading long enough in order to become proficient at the tasks described in the text. Although Goodwin is primarily discussing writing software manuals, his ideas work well with all types of technical writing.

Goodwin posits his own version of Gibson's "mock reader" or Ong's "fictitious reader" in the "authorial" or implied reader as opposed to the actual reader:

As writers, we shape the actual audience's responses by inviting them to recall what the authorial reader is expected to know, to accept what the authorial reader is expected to believe, to become what the authorial reader is expected to become, and thus to read our writing in a manner appropriate and consistent with its genre and purposes (101).

However, according to Goodwin, real readers often resist the authorial role because they feel it's inappropriate or demeaning in some way. This is especially evident when a writer asks the real reader to play a passive authorial role in his text (102). Readers do not want to be passive; rather they want to play a role in the text that is active and interesting.

In order to emplot the reader then, the writer must incorporate the "fabula" or basic narrative structure, into their writing. The fabula is made up of events, actants (those who are acted upon) and actors, and outcomes. Goodwin says, "Put simply, a fabula traces the sequence of events in which someone (or something) attempts to produce some result or achieve some goal" (103). In the course of the narrative, the actor is transformed from a beginning to an end state by participating in the events as they unfold in the story. Furthermore, there is a primary and secondary fabula. The primary is the narrative of the real person reading the real text, and the secondary fabula is the authorial reader in the text achieving some end (105). The authorial reader becomes the hero in the narrative in that by the end of the text, they have overcome all obstacles and succeeded in performing the goals presented by the text. "Just as actual readers tend to translate motion into action, and tasks into narratives of achievement, so they tend to distance themselves from reductive, passive roles and identify with the heroic dimensions of the authorial reader" (108).

An instructional designer could incorporate Goodwin's fabula into her materials with great success, especially since training material is designed primarily to transform the novice trainee into the experienced representative of the company (or any other social organization). Narratives would work especially well with "troubleshooting" training documentation in which the technical support representative needs to learn to come to the aid of a customer in order to resolve the customer's problem. The technical support representative can be identified as the hero who learns all of the important and difficult troubleshooting processes in order to save the customer from problems. The role of hero has to be more interesting to a trainee than that of passive participant.

From this analysis, it is obvious that the field of instructional design can incorporate successfully many of the ideas about audience analysis and motivation prevalent in rhetorical theory. Of particular interest is how to incorporate audience invoked viewpoints from the rhetorical theory discourse community into the instructional design discourse community, which has traditionally focused on the audience addressed viewpoint. It is obvious that audience invoked ideas can promote better understanding of audience in training materials through fresh and unique ways of understanding audience function and motivation. I believe that an instructional designer can better address all of her different audience needs by attempting not only to address but also to invoke her audience as well.

Works Cited

Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." College Composition and Communication 35.2 (1984): 155-171.

Gibson, Walker. "Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers." Reader-Response Criticism from Formalism to Post-Structuralism. 1950. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1980. 1-6.

Goodwin, David. "Emplotting the Reader: Motivation and Technical Documentation" Technical Writing and Communication 21.2 (1991): 99-115.

Long, Russell C. "Writer-Audience Relationships: Analysis or Invention?" College, Composition and Communication 31.2 (1980): 221-226.

Mager, Robert F. Making Instruction Work. 2nd ed. Atlanta: The Center for Effective Performance, Inc. 1997.

Miller, Carolyn R. "A Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing." College English 40 (1979): 610-617.

Minot, Walter S. "Response to Russell C. Long, Writer-Audience Relationships: Analysis or Invention?" College, Composition and Communication 37.4 (1986): 335-337.

Ong, Walter J. "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction." PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21.

Park, Douglas B. "Analyzing Audiences." College, Composition and Communication 37.4 (1986): 479-488.

Pfister, Fred R. and Joanne F. Petrick. "A Heuristic Model for Creating a Writer's Audience." College, Composition and Communication 31.2 (1980): 213-219.

Rothwell, William J. and H.C. Kazanas. Mastering the Instructional Design Process. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. 1998.

Scott, Jerry and Rick Kirkman. "Baby Blues." Cartoon. Baby Blues Partnership Distributed by King Features Syndicate. 20 Sept. 1996. <http://www.babyblues.com/>.