Booth suggests that the perfect balance to approach writing is to find a place between completely dismissing any consideration for the audience and regarding them to the point that it becomes overbearing. This is what he refers to as rhetorical stance. He continues to state that discovering and maintaining this stance depends on the balance of three main elements: available arguments about the subject, the interests of the audience, and the voice of the speaker. There are a few unbalanced stances writers tend to take, especially when dealing with persuasion. The pedant’s stance, which relies solely on statements about the subject, totally disregards the audience. But this kind of writing merely produces exposition with no purpose, making the purpose of the discourse meaningless and empty. The opposite stance would be a piece of writing strictly created for the purpose of appealing or accommodating the audience. It may be successful, but does not truly reach any reader because there is actually a lack of rhetoric. A balanced writer would be evident if his or her piece were able to change the audience’s mind, thus proving a halfway point can exist because it doesn’t push away readers immediately, but challenges them enough to reconsider their own stance.
Rhetorical stance is perhaps the greatest struggle for the writer. Before one even puts down a single word to establish the start of a piece, he or she is already considering the internal tug of war of remaining accessible to readers, yet retaining one’s integrity by not over-compromising. When a writer completely ignores audience, the tone of a work can easily turn to pretentious drivel, which results in vapidity. If one caters to the audience exclusively, he or she risks losing any persuasive theme intended to be communicated in the first place. Therefore, it is just a level of writing comfort that can only be achieved when practiced or otherwise honed in on during the course of a curriculum.
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