Outcome one is about how to be a chameleon writer. It is about how to use different rhetorical devices—like tone, diction, and format—to suit one’s audience and genre for effective communication. A major part of this skill is an awareness of how I am writing, what I am writing, and why. The goals of outcome one are applicable every time text goes on a page (or poster, webpage, or sticky note!), so audience is always something to consider. If audience and genre are not taken into account, it can result in a mismatch between the writing and audience with unpleasant consequences. For example, my biology professor, Adam Leaché reminded us a few weeks ago that he will ignore emails from students that begin with an unprofessional, informal tone. Audience-awareness is key!

SA1 will be my focus for this outcome. I chose the option of converting a news story into a narrative nonfiction piece—a very different genre with very different conventions. The news story about urban coyotes was published on ScienceNews.org and had a matter-of-fact tone, simple language, little description of setting, and focused on giving the reader information rather than feelings. My narrative nonfiction rehash of the story was the polar opposite, and was based off of only six or seven sentences of the article.

 My target audience was not restricted to readers of Science News, so I tried my best to make it appealing to readers of narrative nonfiction by removing the nitty-gritty science and making it more of an experience that stuck as closely as possible to what actually happened. To do this, I used diction, pacing, and description to create atmosphere. Instead of the news article’s cut-and-dry report that “Stanley Gehrt took a late-night drive to the cemetery on Chicago’s South Side,” I slowed things down and expanded this moment to a small paragraph. As a parallel to the previously-mentioned sentence in the news article, I wrote “Stanley Gehrt drove slowly through the thin layer of snow—there was no rush, and he figured that no one else would be driving to a cemetery in the middle of the night in Chicago.” Both sentences convey almost the exact same information, but it different ways. One similarity, though, is that I stick with the relatively simple language so that I do not alienate parts of my intended audience.

 Here and throughout SA1, I described the setting as vividly as I could. In my second paragraph, I wrote “He stepped out of the car and listened to the city sounds submerged in the snow. After the wail of a distant ambulance subsided, the silence sank into all the cracks,” in an effort to give my audience the immersive feeling that they are looking for. I also nudged the tone towards informal, but kept with the third person perspective for the sake of describing things. My protagonist’s thoughts are added and written in italics, as my genre often demonstrates. For me this was not just about changing audiences, though. I wanted to change the audience’s reaction to the writing. Part of how I did this was the careful retention of information—intrigue is an important part of narrative fiction. One wants what they cannot have.

To demonstrate my ability to write for multiple audiences, I’d like to point out my MP2. It was written for an audience of cultural studies scholars, and contains jargon like bioregionalism and eco-spirituality, mile-long sentences, MLA parenthetical citations, and is peppered with quotes. I use a formal third-person perspective for most of the paper, though I included one or two first-person digressions to give the topic some appeal on a personal level—a strategy I noticed in other cultural studies works. Unlike SA1, making the information accessible to a broader audience is not important in MP2, so my use of language is far more complicated than the language in SA1 because my audience and topic call for it. Some ideas can only be expressed that way, like this one:

“In this way, globalization has become a co-creator of the Cascadia movement via its influence on Pacific Northwestern culture, but also a sounding board against which Cascadia can react and strengthen its own core ideology of grassroots activism, sustainability, and life on a local scale.”

The rhetorical choices to suit this audience are worlds apart from those suitable for the audience of my SA1, which explains the stark difference between the two papers. I think this contrast demonstrates my competence in appealing to different readers. Rhetorical analysis was something that I was mildly familiar with, and genre analysis was another one of those things where you say "Oh, that makes perfect sense. Why had I not put this concept into words before?" The really important part for me was to be able to put a name to both of those concepts. With a name, suddenly rhetorical analysis and genre analysis become concrete actions that must be taken. Normally I fall into an intuition-based writing mode, but audience awareness and analysis improved my ability to write deliberately and with gusto!