Your Audience and How to Know Them

While learning to be a professional writer (I am, it's true! Check out this if you don't believe me) I took a course in genre theory.

Generally genre theory teaches one what to expect of things that are written, depending on the reason they're written, and who writes them. With me so far? Basically, if you're taking a university -level political science course, your prof will not be pleased when you hand in a paper called "Dick and Jane go to Parliament".

But genre theory also says that you can tell a lot about who the piece was written for--who the ideal reader is. In many places, you can still be judged by the newspaper you read. The Washington Post is still a well-respected rag, despite several recent setbacks. Fox News, kindly speaking, is a misnomer.

This means that when you consider what is written, you can turn it around and know something about the type of person who follows that particular organ (I don't know anyone who admits to watching Fox--even the people who watch reality shows don't).

So imagine my glee when I ran into this:



You can enlarge that pic so that you can read the headline, but it starts with:
"US President George W. Bush (right) said yesterday. . ."

So let's get this straight: The audince for this paper is someone who, upon seeing a picture of the POTUS, says:

"Hey--who's that ugly waving dude?"