Audience analysis
Specific applications of audience analysis

In the article "Real Readers, Implied Readers, and Professional Writers: Suggested Research", Charlotte Thralls, Nancy Ror, and Helen Rothschild Ewald of Iowa State University define "real readers" versus "implied readers". The real reader is a concrete reality and determines the writer's purpose and persona. A writer who perceives an audience as real tends to conceive of readers as living persons with specific attitudes and demographic characteristics. Therefore, the writer's task is to accommodate the real reader by analyzing this reader's needs and deferring to them. The implied reader, on the other hand, is a mental construct or role which the actual reader is invited to enter, even though the characteristics embodied in that role may not perfectly fit his or her attitudes or reactions. When the reader is implied, the writer invents and determines the audience within the text. The researchers assert that writers must appreciate the complex interplay that may take place between the real and implied representations of the reader in every document. The researchers discuss how their study was conducted for the sole purpose of developing a hypothesis for further study: Are professional writers aware of real and implied readers; does a writer's way of perceiving a reader affect contextual development; do shifts occur in writers' conceptions of readers; are writers' perceptions of readers linked to a sense of genre and explained by principles of cognitive processing?
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