audience

In the context of China's Shenlun (申论, "申发论述") writing examination — the qualifying paper for the national and provincial civil-service recruitment examinations (Guokao 国考 and Shengkao 省考) administered by the State Administration of Civil Service — audience denotes the designated recipient of the document a candidate is instructed to produce. Many Shenlun tasks are framed as "应用文" (applied/practical writing): the prompt assigns the candidate a role (身份), a purpose, and crucially a reader. Identifying that reader correctly is a scored requirement, because the official marking criteria explicitly reward "符合文种格式" (conformity to document genre) and "对象明确" (clear targeting). Misjudging the audience — addressing villagers in bureaucratic legalese, or addressing superiors with imperative commands — produces an automatic deduction regardless of substantive content.

The audience determines three operative variables. First, register and tone: a 倡议书 (proposal/appeal letter) to the public uses persuasive, accessible language; a 报告 (report) to a superior organ uses formal, deferential, summary language; a 宣传稿 (publicity script) for residents uses plain, vivid speech. Second, information selection: an audience of farmers needs concrete steps and benefits, not policy abstractions; an audience of leadership needs distilled conclusions and recommendations. Third, structural conventions: the salutation (称谓), opening (开头/发文缘由), body (主体), and closing (结尾/落款) all shift with the reader. The standard analytic discipline taught in preparation courses is to extract from the prompt the "三要素" — 身份 (who you are), 对象 (who you address), and 目的 (why) — before drafting a single sentence, because the audience constrains all subsequent choices.

Concrete task types illustrate the principle. A 2017 副省级 Guokao prompt asked candidates to draft a 宣传稿 explaining a water-management concept to the public, demanding popularized language. Provincial papers routinely require a 讲话稿 (speech) addressed to assembled cadres, a 公开信 (open letter) to citizens, or a 工作方案 (work plan) submitted upward. In each, examiners check whether the salutation matches the stated reader, whether the tone is calibrated (down to subordinates, up to superiors, or lateral to the public), and whether technical jargon is appropriately translated. As of 2026 the applied-writing component remains a dominant and rising share of Shenlun marks, with audience-targeting consistently flagged in published scoring rubrics as a discriminating criterion between mid-range and high-range scripts.

For the examination, audience is tested principally in the 贯彻执行能力 (implementation/execution ability) dimension of Shenlun, which the syllabus defines as the capacity to draft documents that fulfill a specified administrative purpose for a specified reader. The typical question angle gives a scenario role and instructs the candidate to "write" a named document; high scores depend on visibly orienting the entire text to the assigned reader. Candidates should treat audience as the first decision in the writing process, not an afterthought, since it cascades into genre format, diction, and the level of detail — the very features graders score line by line. Neglecting it is among the most common and costly errors in the applied-writing section.