Audience

Throughout high school, I took both AP Language and AP Literature. Both of these classes heavily relied on strong writing. My teachers talked about audience briefly, and we never really had to consider it when writing. My literature teacher always joked about how we were writing to 80-year-old frail white men who were reading our AP papers, so if we wanted to get a good grade, we had to appease to them. Even though he was joking, there was some truth in his humor. The most effective writing has to be catered to a specific audience, and I understood that this semester.

At first, I didn’t fully understand how we had to analyze our audience. Each document I wrote, was followed by a lengthy essay-like audience analysis of the people/person I was writing to. However, I began to understand that actually filling out information in the premade template was much more effective in presenting and gathering useful information, so I began to use that. (Figure 1)

Another thing that I found interesting about audience is that for some documents, the audience formulated the purpose, while in others the purpose lead to the audience. For example, in the memo engineering proposal, we knew that we wanted to build koala enclosures and we knew we needed permission from the local government. This made us realize that the purpose was to ask for funding and permission from the Australian legislatives to work on our project. In other words, the audience lead to the purpose. In other cases, such as the technical description, I had trouble understanding who I was writing to, at first. I knew that I had to do extensive research on the caliper and how it worked, as well as the technical specifications. As I wrote the document, I understood that people who were looking to purchase calipers for their businesses or people that were curious how their pre-bought caliper works, were the potential demographic of my readers. In other words, the purpose lead to the audience. On the left is my audience analysis at the beginning of the year, and on the right is my latest audience analysis sheet.

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