Analyzing My Audience

This post will take into account the audience I am writing for, in order to better aim my writing.
It will be responses to the bullet list of questions in student's guide on page 41.

Hunt, Tara. "Audience" 9/9/2013 via flickr.
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

• For whom am I writing? What are their beliefs and assumptions?

I'm supposed to be writing for fictitious students in my major, to explain how a person in my field constructs an arguments, but technically, my audience is all of you guys, my classmates. But really, it's the new students in my field.

Since they came into the field, they might believe, like I do, that new scientific endeavors are awesome.

They also might assume that their own field is immune to any kind of negative event. By this I mean they might have an overly optimistic view of the field of space science, thinking that it's only awesome stuff.

• What position might they take on this issue? How will I need to respond to this position?

Directly because of the possible assumptions I mentioned, the audience may think that the author of the text I'm analyzing is just out to bash on a super cool program. I will need to explain the explicit reasons why the author says what she does, and hopefully the audience will understand beyond just a face-value interpretation of what they think.

• What will they want to know?

They should want to know what reasons the author has for, as they might perceive it, buzz-killing an exiting program. Also, whether those reasons are valid.

• How might they react to my argument?

They might have a bit of skepticism, which makes ethos a more important strategy.

• How am I trying to relate or connect to my audience?

I should acknowledge that I, too, really like this kind of thing; everybody does. However, beliefs based on wishful thinking are not justified. I mean that just wanting it to be true that a company is doing cool stuff doesn't mean that it can't actually be sketchy.

• Are there specific words, ideas, or modes of presentation that will help me relate to them in this way?

I think just mentioning that these things definitely seem awesome should convey the fact that I think so.