To determine the extent of influence that a reader's perspective as a member of a specific audience has on the assessment of student writing, a study examined the holistic judgment and the positive and negative comments made by four different types of writing evaluators on 40 different letters, each of which was written to one of four audience types. Writing samples were taken from randomly selected grade 12 students in five randomly chosen English classes. Each student was assigned to write a persuasive letter to one of four types of people: teachers, students their own age, parents, and business people from the community. Forty of the letters (10 from each group) were then holistically evaluated by 40 writing evaluators who represented the four audiences. Findings showed that, in terms of a global response, an evaluator's rater type was not a predictive factor. Audience type was the significant factor in holistic assessment, with the highest scores being given to letters that had been prepared for teachers and business people. Results suggest that, while rater type was influential in a rater's analytical response to a text, the rater's overall impression of the text's success in satisfying the major goals of the writing task was the deciding factor in the holistic ratings. (HOD)