Hoosier Audience?

You will be writing a type of semi-public travel journal and creating highly public internet sites on the rhetoric of tourism and travel and the rhetoric of Rome.

You are expected to write your journal every day and revise it as you re-reflect on your travels with a little help from your peers and instructors. You will be writing a minimum of 500 words per day, 7 days a week. Your compiled journal will be collected and graded weekly and will make up a substantial portion of the grade for your film and literature classes this summer. The work you do in the Street and Studio course will involve keeping a blog and producing other mediated texts that will be available to a broader public, including your parents, friends, other tourists, and other students of Rome.

There will be an (more likely multiple) audience(s) implied in your writing. The critical term that scholars of rhetoric use to discuss this in a broader context is the “second persona,” which you can learn about in an essay by Edwin Black. Penn State Students may get a copy of this essay in the Communication and Mass Media Complete found in this list of E-resources.

In both of these projects, you need to ask yourself:
Who are these documents for?
Who will be reading these documents?
What can I reasonably expect my audience to know about the subject I am discussing?
How much background information do I need to provide for my reader to understand me?
For this audience, what is an appropriate balance between description, explanation, and critical analysis and interpretation?
What do I want my audience to take from my writing?
What kind of perception do I want this audience to have of me?