Audience:

    Before taking Writing for Engineers, my definition for the audience was simply the person reading my paper. Wherever my paper got passed around, that was now my new audience. 

    In Writing for Engineers, you’ re reintroduced to the term, and the proper definition is drilled into you with all the projects we’ve done from the beginning. Your audience is the person you’re constructing this paper for. Who do you wish this paper to reach? What connection does he have to your topic? The reason this becomes so important is because having a broad audience means you cannot accommodate for everyone’s level of understanding. Imagine writing a memo in Shakespearean English for a first grade immigrant from Antarctica to end up reading it. It just doesn’t work out. 

    When you’ve determined your audience, it’s not just checklist that you’ve waved off and you’re done with. You have to keep this audience in the back of your head throughout the entire paper. When you write, you write what they understand. When you try to persuade, you appeal to what your audience is interested in (which is why it’s also good to do a thorough analysis into your audience).

    In my memo, I had made Renata Kobertts Miller, the Dean of Division of Humanities and the Arts, and Susan Perkins, Dead of the Division of Science, the audience. The reason for this being that these were the people I was trying to persuade, and also it had to be a group of people who weren’t too high up the ladder that they couldn’t deal with, or too low that they wouldn’t even address it. A dean of specific divisions of the school was the best idea for this memo. Also in my memo my proposed solution was something that I believed that my audience would benefit from personally as well. (which was the increase in legal book purchases due to affordable pricing).

    What we can conclude from the rigorous assignments we’ve completed over the semester, is that without a proper audience most of the work done without it is useless. Now you’re writing a bunch of words with no purpose. Purposeless words aren’t read.