All in all, audience has been the most pervasive rhetorical element in our work throughout this course.  It is, after all, the only element that has received its own section of each project (audience analysis sheets), and for good reason, as it truly does have a major impact on every aspect of the writing process for technical papers.  I started out with a fairly pragmatic view of audience, thinking that audience was merely the people that I needed to write to to satiate the purpose of my document.  It is very true that audience must line up with purpose, but I think that I began with a somewhat self-centered view of audience, in that I saw attention to audience only as attention to what I need out of people (figure 1).  This is not totally surprising given the nature of the memo we wrote, but the needs of the audience are not merely to be the best answer to the needs of the reader.

I think that my feelings on audience progressed somewhat upon reaching the technical description.  In that paper I was not writing to serve my own aims at all (except insofar as my aims were to educate other people), but was rather writing to satisfy what I saw as important needs on the part of both slide rule enthusiasts and burgeoning S.T.E.M. students.  My relationship to audience supposedly flipped, and I was then simply a vassal to my readers.  

It wasn’t until the lab report that I began to truly experience the nuance of audience and its impact on content.  In that paper, I wished to report on my findings and convince my audience of the validity both of those findings and of my interpretation of those findings (figure 2).  I was not, however, simply serving the needs of one or the other (myself or the reader).  Instead, I had a dual purpose of both providing the government and building owners with information they could benefit from and advocating for my work (and in the process demonstrating my abilities as an experimenter, creating change in a field for which I am passionate, and perhaps securing funding/permission to conduct further research).

The engineering proposal compounded my understanding of the joint motivations brought about by consideration of audience, where I had to write not only academically but also professionally, and where the level to which I could educate the reader and satisfy their needs directly impacted the extent to which my needs (a contract, money, a genuine desire to work on the issue) were satisfied.  

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