One of the most common mistakes students make when writing is that they fail to focus on a specific group of readers. No matter how ambitious writers may be, they must have a specific audience in mind for anything they write. No one truly writes for a general audience, nor has a reason to. A novel can climb to the top of the New York Times best-seller list if it sells 8,000-10,000 copies in a week — which sounds impressive, until you remember the U.S. adult population is almost 250 million. A novelist, no matter how talented and dedicated, is not going to appeal to most of them. A non-fiction author may sincerely believe his or her topic is absolutely essential for everyone to understand, and he or she may even be right, but most people will still choose to do something else with their time than read about it.
Scholarly writing obviously aims at a much narrower audience, one that typically belongs to a specific discourse community. Without a clear sense of that audience, a writer cannot conform to the that community’s expectations in terms of form, style, and use of sources. For example, you may love the work of a specific film director who made historical epics that were filmed on location, meticulously researched to be historically authentic, and were famous for impressive cinematography. You may have an insight about that director’s works worthy of researching and developing into an essay. But without a clear sense of audience, what will your focus be, and how will you structure and arrange that material? What will you assume your audience knows already? If you were writing for a popular audience, of course, you would assume they know little. You would need to provide considerable background, and whatever your focus is, you would need to provide basic information about that. If you talk about historical authenticity, you would need to explain the historical background. If you talk about cinematography, you would need to define some of the technical terms used by cinematographers.
In this class, you are writing for a scholarly audience, but that does not define your audience clearly enough. An essay about that director could appear in many different journals. It could appear in a journal devoted to film criticism that treats film as a branch of literature (which is traditionally how it was seen for a long time). That kind of journal tends to focus on literary qualities: the script, metaphorical meaning, dramatic elements such as acting. However, some film journals treat movies as more of a branch of the visual arts. For this director, you might consider a journal that looks more at the intersection of art and history, especially if you plan to discuss issues of authenticity. Another possible approach, since the director filmed on location in countries that had been colonized by Europe, would be to consider how his films were influenced by using native populations as extras and crew, or possibly the effect that the production had on those natives; such an essay may well find an audience in a journal devoted to post-colonialism.
For this exercise, you must begin to decide on your audience, and thus your genre and purpose. Who will be reading your project? Where will it appear? I am limiting your choice of audience, in that you should assume you are not aiming at a popular audience, such as when one writes a feature for Time or The Washington Post Sunday Magazine. Examine one complete issue of at least three scholarly journals you think might be an audience for your essay. For each one, list the titles of four essays (not book reviews or editorials or fiction) that appear in the issue. Read the introductions and conclusions of each essay. Based on your understanding of each journal, identify which one you think would be the best to which to submit your essay.
Below the names of the journals and the lists of the essays, discuss your findings in two paragraphs. The first should briefly summarize the focus of each journal as you see it. The second should identify the one you think is best for you, and explain why by making connections between your topic and approach and those of the essays you examined from the journal.