Reflective Blog Post on What is an Audience?

I normally do these on Friday, but I have a busy week and wanted to knock this out! So, this week we talked about audience. More specifically, the implied audience vs. the real audience. Dr. Pilsch went in-depth about both audiences as well as other topics. He talks about how the implied audience is one who has a particular role to play or expects a certain set of expectations from the document. We then see some questions outlined that may help us in our search to find the implied audience for our writing and to make sure we are catering to them as well as to our real audience. After learning about implied audience we discussed real audience and it is described like so, “Real readers, meanwhile, are less a question of an abstract class or category of reader and, instead, put forth the idea of imagining who readers are as real, specific humans with particular characteristics that must be accounted for.”

After learning about audiences we discussed how audiences affect the design of our web page, blog, etc. We learned about design, different design patterns, color schemes, font selection, and accessibility. I think the design is an incredibly important aspect to consider because it truly does shape how people will view your page, while also helping with the layout and style of it. Design for me is something I have always been naturally good at and loved doing, whether it is furniture, clothes, websites, or something else all together my passion really comes through. So learning about this was exciting because I cannot wait to put it to use for our final project.

Speaking of our final project…I have chosen to do mine in a group with 2 other classmates. I am normally not a big fan of group project work, however, I think being in a group for this project is going to be extremely helpful because I believe that each person in my group has a different skillset, and then when we put it all together we will be able to create an incredible website. We have already had a preliminary meeting but plan to have another sometime this week or next. Since we have not had our second meeting, I wanted to talk a little bit about our preliminary plan for this project. In our first meeting, we discussed different ideas of what we could do for our project, what the proposal is and looks like, as well as due dates for the project. Once we covered the basics we began diving into topics until we finally settled on one. We decided that since it is election season right now and a very important one at that, that we would create a website that has different areas containing different information about how to vote, where to vote, etc. I am very excited to tackle this project with my team because I think it is something we are all passionate about and will be able to excel in.

I am so glad we covered audience and design this week because it really gave me, and I’m sure many others, a lot to think about in regards to our final project. Well, so long for now, and see you next week as we continue to work on our final project proposal.

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