Tuan Le
ENG 101, Section 0504

Purposing with the help of Audience, Genre and Vocabulary In order to produce a decent piece of writing, one should take into consideration all aspects that involve in shaping the purpose as well as the presentation of it. These aspects are genre, vocabulary and expected audience. This essay will not only go further into analyzing how these aspects have differentiated in Walker’s and Anyon’s writing, but also point out the similarities in the underlying message from both authors about discrimination in gender, races and social classes. First of all, we will start with how the expected audience that two authors are purposely writing affects the other two aspects (genre and vocabulary) in each essay. The reason why audience must be the very first aspect to be examined is because it helps form and shape the two following aspects, which are genre and vocabulary presented in the essay. Lu and Horner have identified the process of knowing the audience as “a complex process of assessing and responding to the expectations, knowledge, interests, demands, and desires that shape the reading tastes and habits of the people we believe are actually going to be reading what we write” (Lu and Horner 118). Mpinga, an “intense, beautiful, and genuine” (Walker 402) African woman, is obviously the primary audience that Walker is writing to. However, such good energy from Mpinga is most likely the reason that shifts the anticipated audience to the entire black women society. Instead of using such courtesy and conversational words that a normal letter should include, Walker’s word choice suddenly becomes more abundant and meaningful as if she was writing a formal critical reflection of her own book “The Color Purple”. The reason I can make this claim is because Walker not only shares with the readers about her personal story of her great-great-grandfather as “the slave owner and rapist” (Walker 406), but also gives the audience a passionate speech about sexist and races discrimination as if everyone is surrounding and listening to her “We are the African and the trader. We are the Indian and the settler. We are the slaver and the enslaved. We are oppressor and oppressed… “ (Walker 409). In terms of Anyon’s essay, I will consider the audience as larger than that. The personal barrier, as existing in Walker’s essay (between Mpinga and Walker), was broken. This essay from Anyon was even published in the Journal of Education vol. 162, no. 1 (1980) (Anyon 225). This also means the audience we are talking about is the whole national wide public. As an article published in a journal, it’s undoubted that the primary audience should be the one who cares the most about the issue introduced. Education is not the problem of only one individual but the entire society. That’s why Anyon needs to pay a really close attention to the structure and the word usage of the essay. She is not hesitant in explaining her methods and approaches to the problem “the methodology of the ethnographical study is briefly described; a theoretical approach to the definition of social class is offered… then the concepts used to define social class are applied to the examples in order to assess the theoretical meaning of classroom events” (Anyon 226). Next, the genre should be able to convey the entire purpose of the authors. From the beginning of “In the Closet of the Soul”, Walker clearly revealed to us her “typical genre” of this essay as a letter, regarding the way she address the primary audience with “Dear Mpinga” (Walker 402). And she ended her letter by stating herself as “your sister” (Walker 410) to examine the relationship with Mpinga. It is not simply a courtesy letter from a book author to her fan anymore but an inspirational piece of essay filled with all of the words from the bottom of her heart. Walker wants to show us her compassion and empathy for her black African woman by saying “We have been slaves here and we have been