What are the 5 categories of audience analysis? what are the three levels of audience analysis? 

Back to: Academic and Professional Writing Unit 2

What are the 5 categories of audience analysis? What are the three levels of audience analysis?

Audience analysis refers to the process of determining the audience of the academic writing and adopting writing techniques that cater to their level of understanding and interests. 

5 Categories of Audience Analysis

The 5 categories of audience analysis are as follows:

Situational Analysis:

Situational analysis is used to identify the traits of the concerned audience that include attitudes of the audience, size of the audience, physical setting, as well as the disposition of the audience towards the concerned assignment. 

Demographic Analysis:

Demographics analysis refers to the analysis which is used for evaluating the quality of the census. Data such as age, sex, occupation, economic background, and the like are used to perform demographic analysis. 

Psychological Analysis:

Psychological analysis is performed with the main purpose of determining the expectations of the audience both before and during the progress of the academic writing. It enables the researcher to discover the knowledge, beliefs, as well as lack of knowledge of the audience. 

Multicultural Analysis:

Performing multicultural analysis is essential because the content of the learner’s academic writing should acknowledge the audience’s diversity. It should include cultural sensitivity and inclusivity.  

Topic Interest and Prior Knowledge Analysis:

Analysing the prior knowledge of the audience is important to avoid making generalisation and assumptions about the same. Determining the interest factor of the audience towards the content is also highly necessary. 

Three levels of audience analysis 

The three levels of audience analysis are as follows:

Demographics:

The demography of the audience such as the ethnic background, gender, religious, age, occupation, qualification and the like also plays a highly important role in audience analysis for academic writing.

Disposition:

Keeping the disposition of the audience in mind and taking the same into account is highly necessary because an audience will always have certain attitudes towards the paper. Hence, researching the same carefully is essential to make your academic writing successful.

Prior knowledge of the topic:

The knowledge the audience possesses about a topic can vary so the researcher has to determine the prior knowledge of the audience.

Making an academic writing audience-centred is highly essential because if the content is delivered in an appropriate manner, it will impact the readers positively.