This week’s reading was about audience, which will be important when creating the final project for this class! The semester is almost over!

Anyway, I was having some trouble understanding the difference between implied and real audience so I decided to look into it a little more. I am using this and this website as my online artifact because it helped me understand the difference between implied audience and real audience. This is important when I am brainstorming for my final project and drafting up my final project proposal!

The first website gives a definition different from the weekly reading, but also gives a specific example. It says that the implied audience is “the “you” a writer or poet refers to or implies when creating a dramatic monologue”. From this definition, I picture a close-knit group of friends, to which one friend is writing to another through a particular story or blog. As another example, I can use my own blog. I try to avoid using words like “we” and “you” in my blog posts, but when I do I am referring to the implied audience. I am picturing the specific audience member who will get the most out of my blog post as possible.

Bouncing off of that example brings me to the second website. This blog states that “a literary critic by the name of Wolfgang Iser, “an implied reader is a hypothetical figure who is likely to get most of what the author intended.””. Going back to the example mentioned in the weekly reading about doing a quick Google search to find a ramen recipe, the implied reader is one who is willing to take the time to read all the personal information before the actual recipe. This ties into the same concept mentioned by the literary critic on the second website, which says the implied reader “someone who can understand what the author has written and also is able to understand the complexity of things such as the metaphors which are used by the author in their books or articles”.

Now that I understand what an implied audience means, I can better understand what the real audience means. The real audience is the actual real human beings that open your blog post, pick up your book, or read your article. (Did you catch the implied audience there??)

I now have a much clearer understanding of what the implied and real audience is, as well as how to apply it to my final project and proposal. For my final project, I want to create a personal finance blog in which I can write about my favorite personal finance books, my experience getting my first apartment, budgeting with my first job, and more. For this, my implied audience will be the readers who get everything out of each of my blog posts. My real audience is each reader who visits my blog, maybe to just skim my posts or really dive into everything I am learning. I am excited for the final project, and for the end of the semester!