Journal 3 - Rory Feinberg

After reading Heidi Estrem's “Writing is a Knowledge-Making Activity,” Andra Lunsford's “Writing Addresses, Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences” & Anzaldua's “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” write in response to the following prompt.

How do you define "audience" and "knowledge," and how are these concepts important for writers? How do Lunsford and Estrem define these two terms, and what connections do they make between these terms and writing? 

I define an auidience as the intended group the text was written for, for example the Harry Potter series written by J.K. Rowling, the intended audience is young readers and wizard enthusiasts. Yet for a book like handmaids tale by Margaret Atwood we see a post apocalyptic world and reconstructed society for science fiction readers and other high level readers. Audience is important because if the Author forgets who he/she is writing for the book may become altered or hard to understand. I define knowledge as any information any human possess's , for example how many teeth your cat currently has is some sort of knowledge, how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie roll? That's knowledge. In writing of course it's not that simple, so many writers today often fill their books with their own personal knowledge or other findings they may have encountered through life. Estrem defines knowledge as what you create in your mind while writing. Lunsford defines an audience as whoever the writer desires by imagining them and giving them a role.These definitions help me understand Anzaldua's text help me understand that an audience can be your own, for example you do not write to please a crowd, but you write and let the crowd come to you. Which I thought was interesting because it allows unique writings to be appreciated but a multitude of people. My definition of Audience and knowledge haven't really changed after reading these texts because to me these are very literal terms. An audience is simply a reader of your work, and whether you intended them to read the text is a different story. Knowledge however has proved to be far more dynamic than i thought it was and that surprised me with how many types of knowledge there are.