The audience is one of the most important rhetorical elements when forming a piece for any of the genres. By defining our audience, we as the writers need to tailor our writing to this audience in a multitude of ways. Our word choice is the most apparent, if our audience is a local high school then our word choice should reflect that; if we were to use terms engineering there would be an amount of dissonance between the audience and the writers. In addition, if we are writing with a specific person in mind we need to take in to account their knowledge and what they support normally.  In Figure 1 you can see a audience analysis of Dr. Tony Liss, the provost of CCNY, the profile sheet takes into account his responsibilities and his education.

More importantly, audience and purpose are interconnected in a fairly indirect way. The purpose of our writing is a call to action to whoever is reading our document, therefore, our audience needs to be capable of the call to action. You wouldn’t make a pamphlet on voting geared towards middle-schoolers, there is no value in informing or even persuading middle-schoolers to vote as they can’t do so in the first place. 

This is a problem I had faced during the earlier portion of this class, I would regularly make my purpose too far reaching and didn’t keep my audience in mind when forming my purpose. As I have completed more assignments I have become better at managing who is in my audience and making sure my writing reflects that.

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