Audience consists of the people that will read or hear your work, and your work should be composed with who you are writing to in mind. You should always have your audience decided on before you start writing so that you understand how you should target them in your work.

Before this class, I was used to writing for a general, predetermined audience. I was always told beforehand who I was writing to, whether it be my teacher, a group of people, or a specific individual. This class was the first time where before I started writing, I had to pick, decide, and research my own audience. The first assignment where I had to do this was the memo, where I not just had to figure out what my topic was but also who I was going to write it to and why. It did take me a while to get used to it, finding out all the demographic information for the people I was writing to, but in the end I believe I can successfully do this. In this class we have never written to a general audience, there was always a specific individual or individuals we were writing to, and even when it wasn’t a single person or persons, we wrote to a specific niche that wasn’t at all general.

The process of determining audience wasn’t difficult, just very specific. We had to make sure we were writing to someone who could actually fulfill the purpose behind our writing, but not someone too high or too low for the purpose. For example, for my memo, I wanted to write to someone in the faculty with the authority to impact the hydration stations throughout campus. However, it would have been foolish to write to the President as my main concern behind my work, the health concerns, are not his specialty and he wouldn’t have any connection to it. That is why I chose to write to Teresa Walker, the Director of Health and Wellness, instead. It is her job to supervise the health on this campus, so she has a connection to my topic that I could use to appeal to her.