Skill 1.B Questions: What a Writer Assumes About the Audience

A writer makes constant bets about readers before writing a single sentence worth analyzing: what they already know, what they doubt, what they need spelled out. You find those bets in the gaps. If a writer defines 'hectare' but not 'ratification,' the readers are people who know treaties and don't know farms. If a speaker has to assert that women are human beings before building an argument, that premise is doing work only because some listeners in the room have not granted it yet. The audience is never generic. It is reconstructed from specific textual choices: what gets a definition, what gets stated as obvious, what gets argued at length versus asserted in passing.

A common trap is answering 'the general public' or 'everyone who reads the passage.' That answer is almost never credited, because it ignores the particular signals the passage planted. Real audience questions want you to name a group defined by what they share: readers who doubt a premise, readers unfamiliar with a technical field, readers who need reassurance. The correction is always to point back to the specific word, definition, or assertion that gave the clue away.

This connects directly to the next move in the same skill: separating who a text addresses from who it aims at. A hospital director writing to staff but clearly managing what reporters will read is still writing with one audience in the room and another in mind. Audience questions sit next to purpose and rhetorical situation questions because all three ask you to read the writer's strategy, not just the content, and together they test whether you can see a text as an act aimed at particular people rather than a block of neutral information.