The Objectives

Review the learning objectives for this course. What's one thing you've learned that connects to an objective and to your future job?

For this post, I'll be discussing the objective "audience awareness", which is stated on the syllabus as follows:

• Audience awareness. Students will analyze audience and purpose in rhetorical situations and make appropriate choices. Measurement: observation and analysis of artifacts produced, including active participation in classroom discussion and blogs.

Throughout this course so far, I feel that we've discussed audience awareness fairly extensively. Before this course, I was of course aware of the idea of audience, but I do not think I understood its full implications. To me, an essay was written for the professor. Anything else was written to, well, anyone who would read it. It seemed to me that a piece of writing was sent off into the world and, though it might follow certain conventions, it was not necessarily written to a particular group of people.

This class has helped me to realize that the idea of audience is considerably more complex that I previously believed. Being aware of a writer's audience helps to better analyze certain pieces of writing. In my opinion this has the most application regarding things published in specific papers or journals, although if audience awareness can be considered to fall under the heading of analyzing historical and cultural circumstance then it certainly has implications for literary analysis.

Before this class, I was unaware of the idea that every piece of writing has an audience. Certainly, I thought, that when writing in a journal there is not an audience. Or even in the case of a short story or novel, which certainly the writer hopes to have read, it did not much occur to me to take audience into account.

Theoretically, I will one day be a professor of creative writing. As a professor I think that audience awareness will be incredibly important. There are a variety of people that you need to avoid enraging in order to get tenure and, after that holy grail is gained, to continue to be successful in your field. In order to do this I think it will be very important to be aware of who I am addressing as I seek to publish and to teach.

Even in applying to PhD programs, audience awareness is important. One's personal statement should be tailored to fit the needs of each specific program, In a broader sense, it's important to be able to write something that would appeal to an admissions committee in general. This audience is different than the audience one might have in mind when writing an article for publication, and worlds away from the audience of students that one has as a classroom instructor,

On the whole, I am now more aware of the concept of audience and the need for it to be taken into account not only in analysis of texts, but in my own writing as well.