“negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation”

 

 For every assignment, I had to evaluate and negotiate my writing goals and audience expectations depending on the genre, medium, and rhetorical situation. I always thought about the best way to convince the audience, what type of tone and diction I should use to get my point across, what medium will be most effective for this specific genre, is my writing appropriate considering this rhetorical situation. I think that this became a natural process as the semester progressed, from the first assignment, the Memo, to the last, the Engineering Proposal. I knew the audience, depending on their knowledge and expertise, might expect a certain level of decorum or professionalism and I have to make note of that. For instance, I knew my lab report would most likely have fellow researchers and computer scientists as my audience, so I had to use scholarly jargon and accurate vocabulary. Figure 1 shows a section from my Lab Report “Human Driver Ethics for Automated Vehicle Technology”, where I define the term “artificial intelligence”. Although I know some of my audience will most likely already know the definition of this term, I’m also staying aware of other audience expectations, who might not understand and need an explanation.