CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold 1 Accommodating Your Audience
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold2 Meatrix: Does it create effective Ethos? Knowledgeable about issue Fair Bridge built to audience Pathos? Concrete language Specific examples and illustration Narratives Words, metaphors, and analogies with appropriate connotations
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold3 Accommodating Your Audience One-sided versus multi-sided arguments Understanding your audience Treating different views Appealing to a supportive audience Appealing to a neutral or undecided audience Appealing to a resistant audience
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold4 One-sided versus Multisided Arguments Types of arguments One-sided… Multisided… Research suggests when to use each
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold5 Understanding Your Audience (1) Book suggests placing audience on scale May need to “invent” your audience strongly supportive strongly opposed
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold6 Understanding Your Audience (2) Try to assess what audience knows Audience for term paper?? Other examples of audiences for whom you may write??? Determine level of background to give Too little leads to?? Too much leads to?? Determine level of formality Use of “I” or “we” or another actor Use of active or passive voice Understanding audience may take more time than researching topic!!
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold7 Understanding Your Audience (3) Understanding audience is problem for professional rhetoricians (e.g., politicians, advertising executives, researchers) So people since the time of the Sophists have developed a variety of “tricks” to use for assessing and understanding the audience
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold8 Understanding Your Audience (4) Most of the time, you know the audience because you’re part of the audience If you’re part of the audience, what will you know about them? Examples?? If not part of audience, don’t consider individuals, but consider an abstraction of the audience—what they know, what they expect, how they will react Examples??
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold9 Understanding Your Audience (5) Understand discourse conventions Flow of words for that interpretive community who somehow set the rules How can you find out about discourse conventions? What are some examples of interpretive communities and their discourse conventions?
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold10 Treating Different Views (1) Appealing to a supportive audience What approach should you use? What are some examples? Appealing to a neutral or undecided audience What approach should you use?
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold11 Treating Different Views (2) Appealing to a supportive audience What approach should you use? What are some examples? Appealing to a neutral or undecided audience What approach should you use? Toulmin argument: claim reason (grounds to support reason) warrant (backing to support warrant)
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold12 Treating Different Views (3) Rebutting evidence—how?
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold13 Treating Different Views (4) Appealing to a resistant audience Delayed thesis Rogerian
CS 4001Mary Jean Harrold14 Discussion (in groups of 5) What is the thesis of the Meatrix? What type of audience does it target? Explain? Suppose the audience is resistant, give an outline of either a delayed-thesis or Rogerian argument for the same thesis