Analyzing My Audience

Shakespeare often wrote “inside jokes” into his works that played to the lower class and peasants.  Shakespeare knew his audience and who he was writing to entertain.  In the same way, I need to be conscious of my audience and know exactly what they need.

I am writing for new students to the engineering college.  It is a safe assumption that all of the students have heard of global warming and some of the options that have been presented as a solution to problem.  This infers that they already have an opinion of their own as to how climate change needs to be dealt with.  Most will probably agree that something must be done, and given that they are engineering students, they probably have an interest in what engineers are doing to find a solution.

My audience may assume that engineers only use facts and figures to make claims.  I will need to delve into how scientists can also make emotional appeals and even put the facts into a biased view.  It will be important to have a very comprehensive outlook of the rhetorical strategies.

Prosperoproducciones. "The audience" 03/02/2013
via Wikipedia. Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

These new engineering students will want to know how to write a rhetorical analysis of an argument made in the engineering field.  They will need to understand how the surroundings of the text are just as important as the content of the text.  This will give an example on how the inner workings of the text add to effectiveness of the author’s argument.

Depending on what the student’s opinion is on climate change, they may agree or disagree with my argument.  My argument will consist of being critical of the author’s rhetorical strategies, and whether I feel the author made a convincing argument, they student may like or dislike my opinion.  However, hopefully the paper shows that no matter what you believe about the topic, you can still evaluate the effectiveness of the author’s rhetoric.

This idea relates to how I will connect to my audience.  I will show that my assumptions on the subject do not affect my argument on the author’s rhetoric.  I will also relate with the audience since we are in the same major as well as analyzing a text that is from the same discipline.  By including my audience in the intro and the conclusion, I will try to convey the importance of knowing how to analyze a public opinionated speech.  This idea will connect the audience to the example of analysis.


Reflection:

I had the opportunity to read through Bailey Mattox's blog post and Hunter McAdams' blog post on their audience.  Hunter took a different approach from me and analyzed the audience of his article.  Although I couldn't relate, I took away some interesting ideas on how to incorporate the role of the audience into my rhetorical analysis.

I could definitely relate to Bailey's post.  I had the same troubles as her thinking that my audience could think/ feel this but they could also feel/ think this as well.  Addressing these points was difficult, but I believe I had well-developed analysis compared to that of my peers.

Although I analyzed my audience well, I saw that they are multiple ways of dealing with the same situations.  Although my evaluation is complete, it is not the only way in which I can view my audience or address them in my paper.  I must keep an open mind of what will best suit my audience in each situation.