How do I work out the text's audience?

Hi Julius!

Great question. Knowing the audience will always help you to understand the writer's choices and to create a more developed, thoughtful response. In an English Language exam, you will always get a small box at the top of any source telling you where the text is from. You should be able to work out the audience from this.

For example, here is the information from the top of an AQA English Language, Paper 1 exam:

"Source A is taken from the beginning of a short story written by Joanne Harris. Mr Fisher, a teacher of English for forty years, works at St Oswald’s Grammar School for Boys."

From this, we can make a general guess that the audience will be anyone from the age of 16+. In this example, the genre and type of text is not very specific so we can relax in the knowledge that it won't affect your answer so much.

I hope this helps!