See It in Practice

Now that you have had a chance to learn about audience and see an audience analysis of an ad in action, it’s time to see what it looks like when a student analyzes audience for a college assignment.

In this video, watch as a student explores her assignment requirements and develops her ideas about the audience for which she is writing.

Video Transcript
Student says:

My professor just posted our next big assignment and wants us to begin some audience analysis, but before I do anything, I’m going to take a look at the requirements.

I see from my assignment that I have to choose a controversial issue, and based on our class discussions, I have been thinking about the topic of marijuana legalization. I feel like, since some states have legalized marijuana that I would approach this at a state level. My home state is Texas, which tends to be a little conservative, so I might have a tough sell on my hands in terms of my audience.

So, my next step is to see if I’m right. I haven’t read any recent information on the state of this issue in Texas, so I’m heading to the web to see what I can find out. I want to know how my audience feels on this issue, so I’m going to arm myself with as much information as possible.

One of the first web articles I found listed Texas as one of the states least likely to legalize marijuana anytime soon. Since I would lean toward legalization in my argument, or at least I think so right now, this might mean I would have a tough sell on my hands.

However, I was surprised to find another source that shared a recent poll indicating that 58% of Texans would support legalizing marijuana and regulating it like alcohol. This makes me feel like I might not have such a tough sell as I thought I would.

I also went to the web to watch some videos. I thought seeing videos would really help me get a grasp on the issues related to legalizing marijuana and how people feel about that.

In this video, I learned many Republicans and Democrats in Texas actually agree on this issue, and there are a variety of reasons why.

I learned a little more about how my fellow Texans feel about the issue in this video that mentions the change in the political atmosphere toward legalizing marijuana in Texas.

These videos and some of the articles I read on the web are helping me to understand that more Texans might agree with me on this issue than I had originally.

However, in my own family and amongst some friends here in Texas, I know there are strong feelings against the legalization, and I found this video that talks about some of the issues I hear people saying.

Clearly, I do have my work cut out for me, even though some members of my audience are going to be more open to my ideas than maybe I had originally thought. Looking at these videos helps me understand where my own state stands on this issue right now and gives me some ideas about some arguments I might explore in order to be persuasive to my audience.

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