| Syllabus |
As you progress towards your final assignment, you should begin to review many of the major course topics. For instance, in the past few lectures we have discussed topics that have considerable importance for how one can view a potential audience. In those lectures I pointed out that every decision we make about topic influences who can read, and respond to, our text. Reaching much earlier into the term, I'm certain you recall that we parsed audience based on many background traits: education, professional background, interests, etc. That idea has been clarified on several occasions during the term. You should now have a fairly well developed sense of the interaction among audience, topic, style, tone, and format.
We have considered a variety of topics dealing with organization and document design. While organization refers to the logical manner which you have chosen to present your papers, document design provides a variety of organizational principles, visual in nature, that can be employed to support that sense of textual organization. I suspect that when you encountered these ideas you had not taken time to consider how they could be used to organize texts to help readers. You probably also had not considered that creating more text to explain some concepts may not be the best approach; using some kind of non-textual treatment might convey your meaning better.
Audience Analysis OutlineEnd of PageHoup's approach for targeting audiences
Five Audience and How to Write for Them (provides some details for Houp's approach)
NASA: Addressing different audiences (supplements "Five Audiences ..." website given on audience lecture website, providing some different audiences and some additional advice for targeting general audiences)
Writers' Workshop BTW -- You can find other resources for writing at the Writers' Workshop website.
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