The third persona is the implied audience which is not present in, or is excluded from, rhetorical communication. This conception of the Third Persona relates to the First Persona, the "I" in discourse (a speaker and their intent), and the second persona, the "you" in discourse. Third Persona is "the 'it' that is not present, that is objectified in a way that 'you' and 'I' are not."[1] Third Persona, as a theory, seeks to define and critique the rules of rhetoric, to further consider how we talk about what we talk about—the discourse of discourse—and who is affected by that discourse.[2] The concept of the third persona encourages examination of who (what category of implied audience) is implicitly excluded from a discourse, why they are excluded, and what this can tell us about how that discourse participates in larger networks of social or political power.
Third persona is the way in which a text alienates or excludes one portion of its audience ('they') in the process of addressing and engaging with another portion, a "second persona" ('you'). For example, the song "Stand by your man" (by Tammy Wynette and Billy Sherrill) begins: "Sometimes it's hard to be a woman/ Giving all your love to just one man." While the first line seems to address (all) women, the second asserts that a (any) woman will have love for a man, implicitly excluding women who do not have, want, or love a man, including lesbians (for whom it will presumably not be "hard to be a woman"). The categories of implicit exclusion made within the text is called the "third persona." The term thus refers to patterns of address within the text itself, that portion of an imagined audience excluded and silenced by the text. The concept was coined by Philip Wander in his article "The Third Persona: An Ideological Turn in Rhetorical Theory," first published in 1984 after a prolonged debate in the Central States Speech Journal. The debate opens with Wander’s article, “The Ideological Turn in Modern Criticism,” which advocates the practice of ideological critique. The essay was met with a series of critical responses. Allan Megill, for example, criticized Wander’s “cursory reading of several of Heidegger’s essays.” Wander wrote “The Third Persona” as his rejoinder.[3]