Audience In The Workplace

After reading this weeks assignment, my understanding of what an audience is really hasn’t changed much. An audience is the intended recipient of any creative piece that you’re crafting. Whether it is for music, film, stand-up comedy, or writing. The writing that you do doesn’t just have to be for entertainment purposes to be intended for an audience. Even the writing that we do in our personal and professional lives have intended audiences. Writing a note to excuse your child’s absence from school or sending your boss an email to request a raise are all done with a specific audience in mind. Even as I write this blog I am envisioning my writing professor and my fellow writing students as the intended audience.

I work for a company that builds aircraft engines for commercial and military applications. Developing and designing a jet engine is a highly complex process that takes many years and hundreds of people. I work with brilliant physicists and scientists who understand engineering on a level that most can’t even comprehend. However, most of these people wouldn’t know the head of a hammer from the handle. They see things on such a highly technical level yet they have to design a piece of equipment that can be worked on and maintained by tradesman who maybe never went to college. All of this work has to be approved by business people who have no technical knowledge at all and only view the world in dollars and cents. Finally, all of this work has to be sold to an audience (the flying passenger) who has no technical knowledge and who doesn’t care about the business finances of creating an engine. The passenger just wants to get from point A to joint B safely. These are all very different types of people who accurately represent the different audience category types.

In my role as a CAD designer I fall somewhere between the engineers and the technicians. I have the difficulty of trying to take what the engineer is trying to achieve and translating that into a design that achieves the goal but is practical enough to be mass produced and reasonable to maintain. While I don’t craft sales pitches or write technical manuals, I do have to design CAD models that bring to life the engineers ideas, can be understood by the technicians, and can be produced in a cost-effective way that the executives will sign off on. It is a complex set of variables to have to coordinate with three very different audiences to satisfy.

Citation:

Online Technical Writing:Audience Analysis. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/english/sections/linguist/independent/kursmaterialien/TechComm/acchtml/aud.html