Monday, October 5, 2015

Analyzing My Audience

In this blog post I will analyze the intended audience for Project 2. With my evaluation of the audience I will have started the investigation into the first of the three categories of the rhetoric situation.

OpenClipartVectors. "Vote Crowd Conference Group Convention Audience"
10/5/2014 via Pixabay. CCO Public Domain/ FAQ License.  
 Who am I writing for?
The audience I am targeting with my Rhetorical Analysis of an Opinionated Public Speech Act are new students in the Chemical Engineering field. This project is to help these students gain an idea of what to expect from a piece of public speech from the Chemical Engineering world. Ideally, these students would have no beliefs or assumptions of what to expect from this field in terms of writing and my analysis will help them understand what to expect in the future. 

What position might they take on this issue? 
The position that is most likely for my audience to take is the side of science. Typically engineers of all disciplines are more scientifically minded and stats and facts are more appealing to them. To respond to the position I will focus a lot of analysis on the credible of the author and his source to establish the credibility of the information they are giving. 

What will they want to know?
I think the audience will want to know if the facts being presented are valid and trustworthy. My audience will want to know to know what kind of evidence is present to back up the argument being made, and if they can trust the evidence that is given in the text. 

How might they react to my argument?
The reaction I anticipate from my argument is a positive reaction. The source being used for majority of the text is a scientist who has practiced in the oil and gas industry which makes him more credible and the information being provided is coming from a reputable source.

Because the information being given is reputable and the argument being made is backed up with facts I think the audience will likely agree with the case made by the Chris Mooney, the author. 

How am I trying to relate or connect with my audience? Are their specific ways through which I can relate to the audience?
I am trying to connect with my audience by keeping my analysis as factual and logical as possible. I will organize my analysis in a clear progression to keep it easy to understand and I will provide lots of evidence and examples from the text to back up the argument I am making.

Reflection 
After reading Kelly and Alyssa's post I realize that even though the three of us have different majors: engineering, physiology, and nursing, because we all have scientific majors there is a lot of overlap between what parts of the audience we have to be conscious to.

Both Kelly ad Alyssa have majors where the readers have a high likely-hood of being familiar with the topics of their texts--icing and circumcision. Because the audience may have some previous knowledge on the topic, they need to make sure that the analysis they do can still be understood by all of their audience.

In my topic I feel like the audience may have heard of fracking before, but chances are they are not experts or even incredibly familiar with the specifics and technicalities of hydraulic fracking in shale. I think this makes my job easier because I do not have to compensate quite as much in my essay for the prior knowledge of the audience. 

5 comments:

  1. Our answers were very similar to one another, the difference, of course, being the facts of our articles/fields. I also took into consideration the fact that our audience includes students interesting in our field, though unsure of how to construct an argument in it. I also almost answered exactly the same under the "what will they want to know" category. I think this has something to do with both our fields being science related. When science is being questioned, there is always a question of validity and trustworthiness.

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  2. Since your audience is specifically chemical engineering students, it makes sense that your audience will side with the side of science. I can guess that you'll have no problem convincing them after seeing you mention that you can prove the credibility of the sources throughout your essay. I don't think you'll have any trouble with your argument because it's based solely on facts. Nice job on this post.

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  3. My topic is easy to understand even for people outside of my field, so your audience really is more precise. Because of this, you may have to do some more explanation of the context and situation that I will. It will be interesting to see how our final projects differ.

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  4. My audience is new engineers as well. I agree that the best approach is through logic because engineers are generally skeptical and inquisitive of issues. However, I feel as though pathos would be effective as well since they are new students. They will be more likely to agree if they are emotionally charged. I also agree that engineers will want trustworthy facts and information.

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  5. I think all of your answers are great. I did notice that we do have some answers that differ. In respect to how we believe that audience will react you said that your audience would react in a positive way whereas I feel that a majority of my audience would react negatively.

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