The audience, like the other rhetorical elements, is a very important aspect of writing. Now you may say that is an easy thing to consider, but when writing as an engineer, you will have to go into depth and do your research on a specific demographic or audience. The definition of the audience is is “a group of readers who reads a particular piece of writing”(WAC).
When I first heard the audience in the classroom I obviously knew what it meant but I wasn’t used to researching the audience when writing, which we ended up doing in the technical description assignment. In the first writing that we did, which was s letter to the teacher, I didn’t really research the audience but I Noticed that I subconsciously wrote the essay in a way that would be most appealing to a teacher, or what I thought would be more appealing. I say this to say that I already naturally thought of the audience while writing, but only in a general way. Going back to the technical description, I think I did a good job of analyzing the audience. This was the first time making audience analysis sheets, and it taught me how to research someone as a potential reader.
I think that the biggest advancement in audience analysis was after the technical analysis assignment, but I, of course, got better and better while doing assignments such as the lab report, and most of all the proposal. While writing the proposal My group as a whole has to decide who would most likely be interested in our proposal. One of those people ended up being the head of FEMA in NY. We came to this conclusion after doing research on what the Head of FEMA does and then linking it to the proposal we were presenting. The proposal’s goals and Fema’s expertise are intertwined. This is just one example of how you can analyze potential audiences.
I would say that now, in comparison to the beginning of the semester, I see the audience as a key point while writing. It is often the first thing I think of after knowing what I’m writing for or about. Before the semester, although I subconsciously kept the audience in my mind while writing, I never actually did research on an audience. This could be due to the fact that most of my writing was for a typical English class.