Recently in class, we discussed how a piece of work should be designed to impact a target audience. The audience refers to the specific group of people that will read an essay, hear a speech, or see a photo. Factors such as age, race, gender bias, and motives affect how an audience will react to an artifact and should be considered by the author during its creation. For example, a millennial audience would typically have a different point of view concerning an ad about reducing student loan debt compared to an audience consisting of members of the baby boomer generation. Although both groups may have attended college and may have had student loans at one point, the difference in time and context changes their perspective and how they should be informed about the subject.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay.

Another concept to consider is if audiences are created or found, as discussed in Lundberg’s The Essential Guide to Rhetoric. The idea of the second persona argues that audiences are formed as a reaction to a specific work instead of generally existing without cause. In this case, audiences can be generated in response to a political problem or even just as a specific subgroup, such as consumers or students within society.

Building a case with a target audience in mind should change the author’s tone and style used. While developing the speech based on a rhetorical artifact, it is important to consider that the audience is the speaker’s classmates as well as a professor but in a casual and conversational setting. It is then necessary to adapt the use of style while writing a blog, where the audience can be anyone in the general public and the method of publication is written instead of verbal. Considering the target audience is a necessary step that should be taken any time a piece of work is created and published.