Quick questions on Writer, text, audience: the QCE English communication triangle (QCE English Unit 3)

Writer. The maker of the text. The writer is not the same as the speaker or the narrator. A novel may have a first person narrator who is not the writer; an editorial is usually unsigned but has a writer behind it. For analysis, the writer is whoever shaped the text's strategic choices.

The dot point's important word is relationships. The frame is not a linear chain (writer to text to audience) but a network. The writer anticipates the audience; the audience constrains the writer. The purpose shapes the choices; the choices reveal the purpose.

The writer shapes craft choices. Voice, register, level of detail, willingness to risk a difficult image. Two writers covering the same story with the same audience produce different texts because writerly style is a real variable.

IA1 is the QCE instrument where the writer-text-audience relationship is most directly assessed. The task statement specifies an audience (and often a purpose and a publication context); the persuasive piece you write is being marked on its calibration to those specifications.

The frame is also useful when you analyse texts (other people's, in stimulus or in IA2 set work). A short procedure.

Confusing writer with narrator. The narrator is a textual creation; the writer is the maker. In analysis, talk about the text, not the writer's biography, unless biography is directly relevant.

The maker of the text. The writer is not the same as the speaker or the narrator. A novel may have a first person narrator who is not the writer; an editorial is usually unsigned but has a writer behind it.

The made object. In Unit 3 the term covers literary and non-literary texts and texts across modes (written, spoken, multimodal, visual).

Who the text is for. Audiences are usually plural and stratified. A novel has a primary audience (the literary reading public) and many secondary audiences (book club readers, students, reviewers).

What the text is trying to do with its audience. Persuade, inform, console, provoke, sell, entertain, witness, dignify. Purposes are often layered; a single text can persuade as it entertains.

The conditions in which the text was made and is being read. Context covers the historical moment, the cultural setting, the institutional location (which publication, which platform, which series), and the immediate occasion. Context shapes what the text can take for granted and what it must defend.

Voice, register, level of detail, willingness to risk a difficult image. Two writers covering the same story with the same audience produce different texts because writerly style is a real variable.

A 500 word op-ed and a 5000 word feature on the same issue have different relational possibilities. The longer text can let the reader meet a person; the shorter text must work harder by symbol and rhythm.

A piece for a youth audience can allude differently from a piece for a retiree audience. A piece for an audience that already agrees needs different work from a piece for an audience that disagrees. A piece for a non-expert audience needs explanation that an expert audience would find condescending.

A persuasive purpose pushes the text toward thesis, evidence and counter-position. An informative purpose pushes the text toward exposition and example. A consoling purpose pushes the text toward acknowledgement and accompaniment before any argument.