An audience is whom the author is writing or composing for.

Audience is very important in writing due to the fact that it gives the author an idea of how to compose his/her writing. Knowing the audience will allow you to structure the writing in a way that is best understood by the readers. Especially if the goal of the composition is to persuade, knowing who is being targeted will help you use the correct format that is best suitable and preferred by the readers.

Audience affects the writings purpose, language, and to some extent genre.

With every different assignment came different groups of audiences, but each assignment could have multiple audiences.

Focusing on the Primary Audiences:

Memo: The audience was the President of CCNY, and knowing to target him, I was able to address certain points that would mainly intrigue his highest interest.

Technical Description: The audience for this assignment are mainly college students who need a durable and effective backpack to go to school or work with. Targeting students, I was able to mainly focus on aspects of the Herschel Backpack that would be most useful for the student such as the extra space or laptop compartment.

Lab Report: The audience for the lab report was directly connected to the topic itself, being scientists but more specifically soil scientists. Determining the audience allowed my group and I to use more sophisticated terms that related to the experiment which someone researching or learning about the issue would understand.

Engineering Proposal: There were multiple specific people targeted in this assignment: Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, Richard L. Swearingen, Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner, and Ajit Pai, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Each individual plays a major part in getting the application that my group and I proposed to being funded and utilized in Florida. 

The following images are taken from the Audience profile sheet, which we were required to fill out with every assignment. This particular audience sheet was made to correlate with the lap report assignment where my group and I decided to target soil scientists:

 

We filled out each aspect of the sheet to the best of our abilities knowing what we know about soil scientists in a broad perspective.

Before coming to this class, I was never asked to fill out a separate audience profile sheet. I would simply write my paper knowing the audience, but never using it to change the format of my paper. Coming to this class changed the way I viewed this rhetorical situation. Knowing the new knowledge that I learned, whenever I read text or write a paper, incorporating the audience and how it can make the writing better is almost essential.