The audience is one of the rhetorical elements in which you establish who you’re writing to or who you expect to read your piece. This can be one person or multiple people, additionally, sometimes the audience will be presented or sometimes it has to be interpreted.

At the start of the course, knowing your audience is one of the key factors you must consider before starting your paper. Figuring out who your audience is going to be isn’t about simply knowing the name of the individual, it’s also about doing research on them, figuring out key factors that will assist you in writing your paper. For example, information like their profession, their hobbies, their education, personal characteristics, etc. For every major assignment we did, we worked on an audience analysis sheet, whether it was one or multiple individuals, creating this analysis sheet helped me grasp more of an idea as to who my audience was. Once I knew my audience, I could figure out the purpose of my paper and the tone I was going to take as I wrote it. The reason behind this is because knowing what your audience will be interested in, will help you write it in a way that will attract their attention.

For example, when writing my memo, I had to figure out which two people I should include as my audience. I chose Vincent Boudreau, the President of The City College of New York, and Jerrold Erves, the Director of Admissions. After doing a significant amount of research on Vincent Boudreau, I found an article where he claimed that “Whatever the barriers to admission that exist elsewhere, City College has made access one of its signature values.” This piece of information demonstrated that Vincent Boudreau cared about the well-being of his students especially in relation to the admissions office which was the issue I was addressing. In addition, Jerrold Erves, the Director of Admissions, was the other individual I chose because his responsibility is to oversee the admissions process, therefore he would be interested on how to improve that process. Once I knew my audience, that helped me develop my writing because I understood I had to keep my memo brief and concise because they already had experience with the admissions process, thus the best approach was to get straight to the point and address the issue and solution.

Figure 1 demonstrates the audience analysis sheet for Jerrold Erves and figure 2 displays the audience analysis sheet for Vincent Boudreau.

Figure 1. Audience Analysis on Jerrold Erves

Figure 2. Audience Analysis on Vincent Boudreau