What is an audience?

This is another one of those broad questions with a simple, yet uninformative, answer. The audience is who you are communicating with. This audience can be the person sitting next to you on the bus, the group of employees you are giving a speech to, or the millions of people you hope to have following your twitter posts online. Sometimes you may not even know who your audience is. You may be trying to discuss a medical topic with doctors but end up having religious zealots debating those same issues. Your audience is basically the people that are willing to listen or read what you have to say.