My name is Thais Gasperin and I’m an exchange student from Brazil. I’m senior student of Civil Engineering in Brazil. My goal in United States is learn more about Civil Engineering and improve my English as well. Therefore, I’m currently enrolled in the course of English 102 in order to improve my writing and reading skills.
     For composition/writing the audience is the people who probably will read a specific text. The audience can be just one person, for example, for a personal letter. However, in the general cases the audience could be a large group of people who are interested in the topic of the text. For that reason, it is important to know who is the audience, since the goal of a paper is through the rhetoric convince the audience about our ideas.
     Thinking about convince people we must know that maybe we need to explain some issues in the text, if our audience isn’t familiar with the topic; or maybe we can be technical if we know that the audience is expert. Moreover, it is important to know why the audience is reading the text, how interested they are and how they will react about our ideas. All those information and analyses are indispensable for the success of the communication with the audience.
     I know, for example, that the audience for my blog and my essays will be my instructor Jerri A. Benson, others students of the class interested in compare the work, and maybe one or two of my curious friends on the internet. For those reasons, my essays and my blog will completely follow the instructions of my professor, in order to convince her that my writing skills are been improved through the semester and I’m trying to do my best.
     The image below shows six groups of people and a red target under the main audience, or as the pun suggests, the target audience. This picture makes me remember an advice of my advisor in Brazil when I asked him if I should explain every single technical word in my final paper of the undergraduation, which would be published in the Civil Engineering website of my Brazilian University. He quickly answered me that my paper would not be with the magazines in the waiting room of a beauty salon, so I should not worry about it since just people who already knew the terms of Civil Engineering would read that. It was funny, but what he was saying to me was “know your target audience, don’t waste your/my time!”

References:
John Ramage et al, The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing (7th edition)
Image: unknown author