Know Your Audience
Instructions: In class we discussed how an effective audience analysis can improve a persuasive message, and we brainstormed different methods and types of questions to use if we were to conduct our own audience analysis. For this activity, you will examine the extent to which an opinion column from The Daily Athenaeum considers its audience – WVU students – in a persuasive message about becoming a resident assistant (RA). Refer to class notes from Unit 6 (Introduction to Rhetoric) about audience analysis to help you complete this activity.
Visit http://www.thedaonline.com/opinion/article_f46a2d0e-affc-11e4-9f5d-bfde139f98b6.html to read the opinion column in The DA titled, “Saving money in college: How being an RA can save on cash” and respond to each of the following questions:
(1) Why does getting to know an audience through an audience analysis tend to increase the persuasiveness of a message?
(2) To what extent did the columnist take the audience into consideration? Identify at least three specific factors from the article that reflect the columnist’s knowledge of you and of other WVU students.
(3) Consider your answer to (2). Did incorporating these factors improve the persuasiveness of the article? Why or why not?
(4) Identify two additional questions that the columnist could have asked the audience (WVU students) to make her argument even more persuasive. Explain why each of these questions would be important to ask in relation to the topic of the column.
