Sullivan, Patricia A. " Writers' Conceptions of Audience in 
					Graduate Literature Courses."  Reader 21 (1989): 22-34. 
					<http://www.hu.mtu.edu/reader/online/21/pas21.html>. 

Patricia A. Sullivan

In his essay, "The Rhetorical Stance," Wayne Booth tells the story of a "bright, energetic, well-informed" graduate student in literature who had difficulty writing "a decent sentence, paragraph, or paper" until he had found a "rhetorical stance" (139). A rhetorical stance, according to Booth, is the common ingredient of all effective writing, and it depends on the writer's ability to discover and maintain a balance among "the available arguments about the subject itself, the interests and peculiarities of the audience, and the voice, the implied character, of the speaker" (141). The "ideal graduate," Booth suggests, will "strike this balance automatically in any writing that he or she considers finished" (140).

Booth's essay is well known to composition scholars. First published in the early 1960s, it helped to revive the notion that writing is a rhetorical process, a matter of adapting the substance and style of one's discourse to the needs of one's audience and not merely a skill a student acquires by learning the "rules" of standard English. However, as influential as Booth's essay has been on our thinking about the characteristics of effective academic discourse, I suspect that what he calls the "rhetorical stance" continues to elude the writing of graduate students today. The ability to discover and maintain a balance among argument, audience, and voice proceeds from the context in which a student writes, and the contexts for writing in many graduate courses do not easily lend themselves to the discovery of a rhetorical stance.

I am probably not the first to point out that the term "graduate student" is an oxymoron, a figure that belies its own tensions as it demarcates a specific role in the academy. But compositionists have tended to ignore the implications that this unique figuration in the academy portend for graduate-student writing, perhaps because our research has concentrated on the cognitive processes and rhetorical contexts of undergraduate writers. Certainly, graduate students themselves are well aware that they live "double lives" in the university and that they bring two identities, the "graduate" and the "student," to their rhetorical situation each time they endeavor to produce a piece of written academic discourse. As they write papers for literature courses, for example, graduate students are not only trying to learn and demonstrate mastery of the "available arguments" that constitute the specialized discourse of their discipline, they are also trying to participate in and engender those arguments. They are trying to become not only the inheritors of but contributors to the knowledge that is generated through the discursive practices of their disciplinary community. Thus, they write with two "voices," as "students" responding to the institutional demands and requirements of their course work and as "critics" and "scholars" attempting to situate their discourse among those of the discipline's recognized authorities. And they write for dual and oftentimes conflicting audiences, for the professor who will respond to and evaluate their work and for a professional readership, an imagined, abstract, and largely hypothetical construct (e.g., "Dryden scholars" or "critics of contemporary American poetry"). The unique writing problem for graduate students, then, is that they must somehow strike a balance among argument, voice, and audience in their writing when each of these elements represents in itself a potential source of conflict in the act of writing.

In this essay, I will focus on graduate students' conceptions of audience in order to highlight some of the writing problems attending the rhetorical situation of graduate students involved in literary studies, problems which I locate both in their unique status in the academy and in the specific disciplinary contexts in which they write. If, as Booth says, graduate students must take into account the "interests and peculiarities" of their audience in order to write effectively, then an initial decision they must make, one which will have a bearing on other elements of their rhetorical situation as well as on features of their written texts, is for whom they are writing. I have cast this decision in terms of a dilemma, one of writing both for a professor, an actual reader, and for the profession, an imagined readership, for these dual audiences may make competing demands on the writer. This "potential for conflict" has already been noted in theoretical discussions of audience. Douglas Park, for example, observes that the meanings of

" audience"... tend to diverge in two general directions: one toward actual people external to a text, the audience whom the writer must accommodate; the other toward the text itself and the audience implied there, a set of suggested or evoked attitudes, interest, reactions, conditions of knowledge which may or may not fit with the qualities of actual readers or listeners. (249)

Park further divides the second meaning of "audience" into "the set of conceptions or awareness in the writer's consciousness that shape the discourse as something to be read," a conception we get at by asking, "'What audience do you have in mind?'"; and "an ideal conception shadowed forth in the way the discourse defines and creates contexts for readers," which we get at through "specific features of the text "(250). Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford group the two central perspectives on audience (outside the text and inside the text) under the rubrics of "audience addressed" and "audience invoked." Rather than seeing the two perspectives as "necessarily dichotomous or contradictory, " however, Ede and Lunsford maintain that writers address a reader outside the text but also "embody or give life to their conception of the reader" in their text by invoking a role for that reader (167).

My observations in the discussion that follows stem from a year-long study of graduate-student writing I conducted at Ohio State University, a project which included case studies of four graduate students–two masters' and two doctoral students–as each completed writing tasks assigned by his or her professor in a graduate literature seminar. Each case study involved class observations, interviews with the students before, during, and after the course, and analyses of the texts the students wrote in response to their assigned writing tasks. Given the immediate contexts in which students were writing, the particular course and writing tasks assigned, I sought to determine what audience the graduate students had in mind as they wrote by eliciting responses about their writing processes in the interviews and then seeing how these responses accorded with certain features of their finished texts. I was also interested in knowing the role they invoked for their audience within their texts.

While responses varied among the four students with respect to who they perceived to be their primary audience, results for all four studies were remarkably similar when both retrospective accounts of the students' writing processes and the students' finished texts were taken into account: the students wrote primarily for their professors. The professor of the course, as the actual reader standing outside the text, superceded all other considerations of audience. Thus, regardless of who the students claimed to have in mind as their audience as they wrote their papers, other information they provided about their writing processes revealed that they actually had their professors in mind. The professor, moreover, became the audience that the students invoked within their texts, the conception of audience "shadowed forth" in certain features of their written texts. The predominant characteristic of this audience or the role the students invoked for their audience was primarily that of an evaluator or grader and only secondarily that of a colleague who stood to be informed or persuaded by the logic of the student's arguments.

A summary of each case study will serve to illustrate my findings with respect to audience as well as to highlight differences among the four students and the contexts in which they were writing. "Hank" and "Lisa," the two masters' students, both claimed that they had themselves in mind as they wrote term papers for their courses. Hank was assigned a 15- to 25-page term paper on the topic of his choice in his Twentieth Century American Literature seminar. Hank's choice of a paper topic coincided with his major reason for taking the course: he wanted to "try out" a potential thesis topic–an examination of Sylvia Plath's short stories, which he felt had received too little attention by modern critics–with an actual reader, in this case, a professor whom he had had in a previous course and the only professor, he noted, from whom he had "never gotten an A." Hank's professor had asked the class to write "theoretical" papers rather than "research" papers. By "theoretical," the professor explained, he meant that students were to arrive at a thesis on the basis of their own close reading of texts, but that the thesis had to be "something more than 'this author is doing this with this text.'" He also noted that other authors might be included in the students' papers as a point of comparison or contrast. The thesis of Hank's term paper was that a certain binary opposition–between isolation and invasion–can be found in many of Plath's short stories and poems. In his paper, Hank cited a number of textual examples to show how this opposition functions as a "major structural principle" in Plath's work. He also included a paragraph on Flannery O'Connor in his paper, noting that a similar opposition between isolation and invasion informs several of her short stories as well. Hank expressed regret at this latter decision in our final interview, however, claiming that the paragraph on O'Connor "seemed like a digression" in his paper and "didn't really fit" with what he was trying to do.

Hank claimed that he had himself in mind as his audience as he wrote. But he also revealed that he "had a feeling all along that whatever I said, he [the professor] would disagree with it." When we consider the fact that Hank chose a thesis that corresponded to the "theoretical" objective of the writing task set by his professor, that he heeded his professor's suggestion to include another author at the expense of his argument's internal coherence, and that he imagined his professor disagreeing with whatever claims he made, we can see that Hank actually had this specific professor in mind throughout his writing process, that he was directing his discourse to the interests and peculiarities of this particular reader. The professor became, for Hank, both the actual reader outside his text who would evaluate both this particular paper and his potential thesis topic, and the audience within his text, an audience with whom he imagined to be engaged in argument.

Lisa, like Hank, claimed to write her term paper for her seminar in Shakespeare for herself, but unlike Hank, Lisa chose a topic outside the task framework imposed by the professor of the course. The specific focus of the course was on Shakespeare's last plays, which the class read in conjunction with several earlier, more popular and critically acclaimed plays in order to evaluate the critical consensus that the later plays were somehow "not as good" as Shakespeare's earlier works. Throughout the term, students wrote short position papers on topics distributed by the professor. For their term papers, students were to write an eight- to ten- page essay and could choose their own topics as long as their discussion included one or more of the later plays. Lisa, however, chose to write about Othello's popularity in the Old South. This decision reflected Lisa's felt sense that she lacked the knowledge or expertise to engage other critics in argument or to critically assess a play. Many times throughout the term, Lisa said she "didn't know enough yet" to talk about what other critics had said, and she felt she couldn't compete with her professor's own knowledge of the plays to write a convincing analytical essay. She said that she generally preferred to do research, which she characterized as "tracking down facts in the library," to writing literary criticism, and her topic, which she cleared with her professor, gave her the opportunity to do research on an issue that she felt she "knew something about" because she had lived most of her life in the South. Lisa said she wrote the paper for her own knowledge and didn't care about a grade. At no point in her writing process did she imagine she was writing for a "professional audience"; she simply gathered the work of other critics and scholars in her paper to present three theories which could account for Othello's popularity among audiences in the ante-bellum South.

Through the position papers which Lisa wrote throughout the term, both Lisa and her professor discerned that she had writing problems, and they worked together on her writing, particularly on the conventions of literary argument. Thus, when the time came for her to begin her term paper, Lisa was highly self-conscious of her writing and of her own role as a student; her paper itself essentially became an exercise in improving her academic writing skills. She had frequent conferences with her professor as she constructed her paper, asking him questions such as "If I'm just presenting facts, do I have an argument?" and "If I say there are three theories, do I have a thesis?" From these conferences, Lisa received her actual reader's response to her writing as her paper progressed. And she assumed, as a writer, the role of a student of writing as well as a student of literature.

Lisa's lack of any conception of audience beyond the classroom context, her conception of herself as student and not as a "cultural critic" or "historical scholar," and her professor's frequent interventions in her writing process suggest that she may indeed have been the audience she "invoked" in her writing in the sense that she was writing to inform herself of the findings of her research. In this respect, Lisa was engaged in a "writer-based" rather than "reader-based" discursive exercise (see Flower). But significantly, she had to "clear" her paper with her professor, the actual reader who would evaluate her writing performance, at each stage of her paper's development. In other words, to become her own "audience," Lisa had to assess the relative strength and merit of the argument she was making through the evaluative eyes of her professor, whom she had cast in the role of a teacher of writing.

"Karen" and "John," the two doctoral students in my study, each revealed at some point in their writing processes their awareness of an implicit institutional expectation that they would write for a professional audience. Karen was assigned a 15- to 20- page term paper in her Hawthorne seminar and was to take into account the work of at least two Hawthorne scholars in her paper. When asked who she considered to be her reader or audience as she wrote, Karen framed her answer in terms of a dichotomy: as a doctoral student, she said, she knew she was expected to write "like a scholar" for other "scholars," but in reality, she wrote for her professor, whom she labeled her "immediate audience." Karen explained that her goal was to teach literature and composition and to administer a teacher-education program at a historically black college similar to the school from which she received her bachelor's degree.

Primarily interested in teaching, or what she called the "practical aspects" of literary studies, she professed little interest in doing scholarly work and was skeptical, even critical, of its "intrinsic value in the real world." Karen said she always tried to choose topics and develop them in a way that would eventually inform her own teaching; her professor, in her view, was in the best position to oversee this process. Thus, Karen said, she always wrote "for the professor" with the express purpose of "getting a good grade." She would find out what her professor wanted and how he or she wanted the paper and then model her own writing on the way theprofessor approached literary texts in the class.

Karen adopted this strategy, which she claimed to have learned "through years of being a student," for her term paper in the Hawthorne seminar. She discussed potential paper topics with her professor in conference, chose a topic that represented a compromise between what she wanted to write about (Hawthorne's use of a "storyteller" in several short stories) and what her professor said he would "be interested in reading" (Hawthorne's ambiguous endings), and basically used the same close-reading strategy in her paper that he had used in class, supporting her argument with statements made by two outside critics. While aware that she was "supposed to write for other scholars," Karen felt that such an audience was in conflict with her own goals. Rather than attempt to serve two masters, as she put it, she resolved the conflict by determining the expectations of her actual reader.

John's conception of audience was perhaps the most interesting among the four case studies because his writing task in Restoration Drama clearly represented an invitation to write for an audience other than the professor. John's professor assigned a journal rather than a term paper or a series of formal papers. He explained that he knew from experience that graduate students tend to shy away from courses in seventeenth and eighteenth century literature, and that if he "came at them" with a formal paper, they would be "in a panic" and would write very narrow papers. The journal, in his view, was a way to solve "all these forbidding problems.It would free students from the restrictions and conventions of the formal term paper and give them a discursive space in which to do their most fruitful and productive work as they defined it. He conceived of the journal as a "highly private diary," a way to allow individual students to ,'move" as their minds "most actively and happily" wanted to go. They could "think on paper' about whatever ideas captured their interest and could use whatever discursive strategies they needed to get at something. The only specific instruction he gave with respect to the journals came during the second half of the course. Students were to explore several volumes of Notes and Queries and attempt to write their own two-page, publishable "Note."

Unlike Karen, John's interest in graduate school was informed by an interest in scholarship rather than in teaching. He characterized himself as a "Johnsonian" and as a historical scholar, "interested in historical accuracy rather than aesthestic evaluation." He had already approached another professor about a tentative dissertation topic, the influence of The Book of Common Prayer on Dr. Johnson's prose, and said he had enrolled in Restoration Drama because he wanted to learn more about the period and because he was interested in Johnson's reflections on Restoration drama for his dissertation and for other works he wanted to publish.

John composed his journal on a word processor; the finished product came to 34 pages, much of it single-spaced. His entries included reflections or " musings" on seven plays, a summary of a critical article, and a two-page "Note" (on Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved); the last ten pages of his journal consisted of a detailed outline of a critical essay on Dryden's All for Love and scene-by-scene summaries of Shakespeare's and Sedley's versions of Antony and Cleopatra. John said that he had himself in mind as his reader for his journal, "with the possible exception of the Note," which he imagined writing for "readers of Notes and Queries ... who might be interested in Venice Preserved." While John expressed misgivings about the assignment at the outset of the course because he had never kept a journal for a course before and "wasn't quite sure what was expected," he revealed no apprehension in our final interview about how his work would be evaluated. In fact, at only one point did John explicitly refer to his professor as the reader of his journal: when asked whether he planned to submit his Note for publication, he said he would wait to see what his professor thought. John did tend to be self-critical of his performance in the journal, however. He lacked a sense of completeness, he said, because, late in the term, he had become taken with Dryden's All for Love and had gotten caught up in reading other versions of the Antony and Cleopatra plot to explore his "intuition" that Dryden's was "the superior work." The detailed summaries in the last part of his journal reflected this reading but they also revealed, he said, the fact that he had not come to any "closure" on the subject. He did not consider the journal "finished" because it contained no conclusive insights.

Even though John did not outwardly recognize his professor as his audience, certain features of his text together with other comments he made during our interview suggest that he was actually highly conscious of writing for his professor, that he not only conceived of his professor as his audience but adapted his discourse to this conception of audience throughout his journal. First, John wrote a note of exactly two pages in response to his professor's direction to write a two-page note, even though those he had read in Notes and Queries "tended to be longer, up to eight pages," and he felt he should have elaborated more on the "political muddle" of Venice Preserved in his own Note. John confined his note to two pages, as he explained in our interview, "to play it safe." Second, in only one entry (early pages of his journal) did John revise a claim he had made in an earlier entry. If he changed his mind about other issues, either he did not record the change in his journal, letting it stand as stated, or he revised (or perhaps deleted) the earlier passage before he allowed a reader to see his journal. In other words, John's journal did not contain starts, drafts, or other textual evidence of evolving stages of thought but a series of autonomous, mutually exclusive entries on various topics. He prevented a reader from seeing any changes in his thinking by deleting or revising passages before he submitted the journal to his professor. Third, most of John's entries were cast in a highly formal prose style. In discussing The Man of Mode, for example, John wrote, "That the play honestly represents the results of a woman's giving up her honor to a comparatively callous man, could hardly be disputed. Love it is jilted (though she knows it not), and Bellinda is confirmed in the infidelity of her lover (though she knew it all along.) " And John wondered with respect to Conquest of Granada, "What means the image of Spain? I could never discover." Taken out of context, such passages, with their lofty diction and syntactical inversions, could easily be construed as examples of Renaissance or Restoration prose, their writer comfortable at home in the 16th or 17th century. In the context of this course and writing task, however, such passages tend to signal an intent on the part of the writer to converse with (and perhaps impress) another reader, one who is well-rehearsed in the prose style of the earlier era. The formality of John's prose style, in other words, betrayed his claim to be "writing for himself." Finally, he included a table of contents with his journal–a list of topics that would be addressed and the order in which they would appear. The topics formed headings for each entry. In providing a table of contents, John adopted a formal convention we normally find in literary artifacts intended for a remote readership, a directory for readers who do not have immediate access to the writer and thus require a formal guide to the organization of the text. But John's formatting procedures served another as well. Although John did not have a sense of completeness and regarded his journal as unfinished, his table of contents and topic headings served to create the appearance of completeness or closure. In other words, the journal as a whole, like most of the individual entries, appeared to be a "finished" text.

The fact that John "played it safe," deleted and revised what he later judged to be inaccurate readings of the plays, wrote in a highly formal prose style, and created the appearance of a "finished" text suggest not only that John was writing for a reader other than himself but for a particular kind of reader–one who was going to evaluate his work. What he gave his professor was neither a highly private diary nor a record of evolving stages of thought but a highly polished piece of writing. It is important to realize, however, that John was not addressing the actual professor of the course. John did not know what his professor's expectations were, never having taken a course from him before and never having kept a journal. The professor himself assigned the journal to free students from the formal constraints of a term paper; he deliberately left the assignment open-ended to allow the students to define the journal for themselves; and he proposed the journal to the class as a "highly private diary" in part to displace his own institutional authority. Had John written for this particular professor, he would not have felt compelled to come to closure, affect a formal voice, or follow directions to the letter of the law. John wrote for an idealized professor; he addressed and constructed a reader based on his experiences in previous graduate courses and on his knowledge of other professors' expectations about what constitutes appropriate academic discourse. In essence, John created an audience in the likeness of past professors and thus created a journal bearing many of the earmarks of more formal kinds of academic writing. He adapted his discourse to an internalized conception of audience, not to the interest and peculiarities of his particular reader.

In general, my case studies of graduate-student writers support the findings of past research on undergraduate and secondary school writers: students tend to resolve conflicts or ambiguities in their rhetorical situation in favor of the immediate demands of the course. In the face of uncertainty, they lean in the direction of the familiar, of the known. They recreate the more familiar genre, they address the more certain reader. The most certain reader, in most classroom situations, is the teacher standing in front of the class or seated at the seminar table. And once students address their discourse to this reader, other elements of their rhetorical situation begin to fall into place. In the four case studies I presented, writing for the professor, perceived as an evaluator (or what Britton calls the "teacher-examiner"), influenced decisions made with respect to topic, argument, structure, purpose, and even style.

But where my case studies add what I take to be a disturbing footnote to previous studies of student writing is in my finding that graduate students in literary studies develop a stronger rather than a diminishing sense of their professor as audience the further they advance in their graduate careers. The two doctoral case studies are particularly instructive in this regard. For Karen, writing for the professor has become a kind of heuristic that allows her to produce what she considers effective academic writing; it helps her to structure her discourse and determines her purpose for writing. John has internalized this conception of audience to the extent that he brings it to each new writing context where it proceeds to affect decisions about genre, convention, and style, even when such choices, manifest in the texts he writes, are not evoked by either the professor or the writing tasks of the particular course. If the purpose of a graduate education is to prepare students to participate fully in the conversations of the discipline as scholars and teachers, then writing for the professor is ultimately a self-defeating strategy, no matter how effective it may be in any single situation, for this strategy only confirms the writer in the role of student. To achieve a voice of authority, graduate students need to develop a sense that their writing has an exigency beyond the particular course or even the particular institution in which they are situated as students. To appreciate the social functions of writing, in other words, they need to develop richer, more varied conceptions of audience and practice a variety of discourses.

If the results of my study are disturbing, given what we perceive to be the fundamental purpose of graduate education, they are not altogether surprising when we consider the immediate contexts in which the students were writing. In three of the four courses studied, writing was a marginalized activity, separated from both the literary content of the course and its primary discursive activities–private readings and class discussions based on these readings. Literary texts occupied the center of interest in the class while the students' own texts, usually due in the last week of the term, served as the measure rather than stimulus of learning. Further, in none of the courses did the assignment of the writing task(s) include a discussion of audience or, for that matter, a discussion of genre and conventions. Papers were seemingly assigned with the expectation that graduate students already knew the formal conventions of academic writing, so that any discussion of the rhetorical contexts of the particular writing tasks was apparently deemed unnecessary. For the students, writing became an academic exercise which they accomplished more or less successfully depending on their experience with the genres and conventions of academic discourse. Finally, in all four courses, the writing tasks were writing for an audience of one–the professor. Students did not read or respond to one another's work, nor did they explore, as part of class discussion, potential readerships beyond the course itself. The professor was the only audience with whom the writers were rhetorically involved. This may explain why the audience the students invoked in their writing became so closely identified with the audience they addressed, their actual reader, and why, in John's case, an invoked audience took on the characteristics of previous actual readers.

I do not propose that we instill in graduate students a narrowly conceived notion of "'professionalism" by pushing them toward early publication or making "publishability" an evaluative criterion for their papers. Such an approach surely confuses the ends (or aims) of graduate education with the means and ignores, in any case, the root of the problem: the suppression of writing in graduate literature courses. Wayne Booth makes a case for the inclusion of composition instruction in graduate literature courses in "Me Rhetorical Stance," but my own study suggests that many literature courses still privilege the reading of literary texts over the writing of scholarly and critical discourse. Writing is relegated to the margins of graduate coursework, so that the act of writing takes place, in effect, in a rhetorical vacuum. It is up to the students to determine argument, voice, and audience on their own, apart from the course that constitutes the specific occasion for inquiry. Graduate students will not "automatically" strike a balance among these various elements in their writing if they are not situated in a context that allows them to do so. A more viable solution, then, is to make writing an integral part of graduate academic coursework–indeed, to make the writer's relation to literary texts part of the problematic of the course. Whether the discourse in a given course is predominantly hermeneutic, historical, or textual, the text that the graduate student produces must be deemed more important than it presently is, the conditions of its production part of what is taught. Such a pedagogy will necessarily include a discussion of the range and characteristics of one's possible audiences as well as of the arguments and strategies required to stir debate or induce assent in those audiences, for it will be premised on the social functions of academic discourse that underlie the specific aims of graduate education. What is at stake in such a curriculum is not, finally, effective writing about the literary tradition, but the writer's ability to assume an active and participatory role in shaping that tradition.

Booth, Wayne C. "The Rhetorical Stance." College Composition and 
	Communication 14 (1963): 139-45.


Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The 
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Flower, Linda. 'Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing." 
	College English 41 (1979): 19-38.


Park, Douglas. "The Meanings of 'Audience.'" College English 44 (1982): 
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