Knowing your Audience

My blog group and I entered into a healthy rhetorical debate after class on Thursday about what originally was the scope of our thesis for our multimedia presentation. Ironically, our own discussion's scope broadened  and we began to discuss the importance of knowing your audience and the dangers that are associated with assuming to much about your audience. Though by the end of the debate we began to focus back in on discussion on the scope of our thesis, my mind was left pondering the idea of knowing your audience and what that meant to a rhetor when presenting a rhetorical argument.

We have learned from our RCL book [yeah Im citing it :) lol] that the more you know about the audience you are presenting to the better, but where do you draw between knowing your audience, and making assumptions about commonly held beliefs?

I will use the example from our group to explain the question I posed. As we began to discuss our thesis which was originally "The ethics of using adderall in a university setting", I had the assumption that we were only talking about the illegal use of adderall. My thinking was based off of my belief that taking drugs that are prescribed to you by a doctor is ethical. I believed this to be a common belief held by most Americans, and most university students.  However, Devron brought up a different viewpoint. He said that he assumed that when we said adderall we were discussing the use of adderall both legally and illegally and discussing the ethics of taking a prescribed drug to make students who are naturally disadvantaged at their ability to focus, perform above their natural levels.

This is the point where the knowledge of our specific audience diverged. I assumed the audience would understand taking prescribed drugs as ethical, and Devron countered saying that some members of the audience may not have this assumption.  Sadly, just as our entire group was entering into the debate class ended.  However, Devron and I were not done with our discussion about our audience and continued for a few minutes after class. As we both began to head off in different directions towards our next class, we decided that we both needed to do more research on our topic and our audience. This would ensure that we were properly unwrapping our controversy in a way that would not bias our audience by assuming commonly held beliefs. However, we needed to also find a way to limit our thesis to make a direct a strong presentation of our controversy.  For today, the conversation will hopefully come to a conclusion as we nail down our thesis and move forward on our multimedia project, but I do not think my personal contemplations of knowing your audience or discussion surrounding this issue is quite over...

(P.S. Shout out to my blog group!! Sophia, Katharine, and Devron!!)