As one of the rhetorical elements, audience has been heavily emphasized throughout our assignments. As our writings are a form of media we are conveying to someone, it is important to consider and analyze who we are conveying this writing to. Aspects of the audience like their stance, their reading level, their field of expertise, etc. affect the topic of your writing and the language utilized. For each assignment, we utilized audience analysis sheets to help us understand who our target audience is. These profiles listed aspects to consider, such as their background, their occupation, their reading level, what we are trying to convey to them, etc.
For instance, I considered Dr. Vincent Budreau as one of my audiences in the memo assignment. Dr. Budreau is the current president of The City College of New York (CCNY) at the time of writing this. The contents of my memo discuss the issue of the advising system for declaring a major at CCNY. This issue is of significant importance to him as this concerns the advising system at the school and affects students declaring a major. As president, he would probably be concerned and he has the authority to implement improvements to the advising system. While writing the memo, I drafted an audience analysis sheet of Dr. Budreau’s background, responsibilities, reading level, and other aspects (Figure 1) to understand my audience better and base the writing and professionalism of my memo to his reading standards.
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