Audience Analysis

In many professions, projects of the scope you are working on with your Analytical Report require a detailed project plan. These proposed plans usually describe the tasks that must be undertaken to investigate potential conclusions or solutions, plot out a realistic schedule to complete the assignment, and identify the resources required for completing the project. You will complete and turn in such a plan in the form of a Proposal to your instructor.

As this is an academic exercise, part of your proposal will need to detail the theoretical “case” you have fabricated (like the cases in the text book for the Message Packet). You will need to create a hypothetical audience, purpose, and context appropriate and consistent with the rhetorical situations particular to your own future profession.

There is a key difference between the Analytical Report assignment and the Proposal assignment, though they work together as one long project. The purpose of the Analytical Report will be to reach a conclusion about a problem or situation and offer a recommendation to your audience. The purpose of the Proposal is to convince me that you have a good topic and plan for writing your Analytical Report. The context of your Analytical Report will be invented by you to explain the full complexity of your realistic situation, representing what you expect to face in your career.

Proposal Assignment

You will write a document that presents your hypothetical rhetorical situation for your Analytical Report, proposes your project plan to your instructor and requests permission to proceed with the project as planned.

In order to present an acceptable situation, you will need to imagine a professional entity (management, company, program, client, etc.), and present a plausible explanation of a rhetorical situation requiring an analysis of a course of action, a choice between alternatives, etc. You will need to describe your report’s audience(s), and your purpose in analyzing the course of action and making a recommendation.

You will create your own situation. You may decide to choose an existing company that you can research or make up a completely fictional company. Either way, you will be analyzing real data that you research to support your conclusions, so your situation must allow you to find read data through research. You cannot create a situation in which all the numbers and facts are purely imaginary. For example, you cannot focus your report on the feasibility of purely imaginary product, such as a device that can instantly create any food. There is no way to research the data about how to create a product like that if it has never been done before.

For your project to be approved, your instructor will need to be convinced of

1) the suitability of your project topic and rhetorical situation,

2) the availability and accessibility of the information required to investigate and present a recommendation, and

3) the feasibility of your plan for conducting the investigation and writing the report.

Remember, your proposal is worth 200 points, or 20% of your overall semester grade.

General Requirements for the Proposal

Your project proposal should meet the following general requirements:

• Format the proposal as an extended memo to your instructor.
• Use headings (properly formatted in Microsoft Word) for your major sections and subsections.
• Include all of the specific sections discussed below
• Length: 4 – 6 pages, single-spaced, with double spaces between paragraphs.

Content Requirements for the Project Proposal

You must convince your instructor of the following:

• You have fabricated a realistic situation, similar to one you could face in your professional future.
• You understand your client’s problem, or need to choose between alternatives.
• You understand your client’s criteria or goals for a successful solution, or choice.
• You have an effective, well thought-out plan for researching the alternatives and writing an analytical report based on your findings.
• You have developed a comprehensive work plan (with a detailed task analysis) and realistic schedule for completing the work on time.
• You are qualified to perform this work. (One way of establishing your qualifications is to demonstrate that you can conduct the appropriate research, which you will show with the annotated bibliography.)

To receive approval for your project plan, your proposal must include the following elements (use this list as a simple checklist, and include these as section headings in your Proposal):

• Introduction

• Briefly summarize your intentions for the proposal

• Description of Proposed Rhetorical Situation

• a detailed explanation of the rhetorical situation you have invented for your report, identifying the situation’s audience, purpose, and context
  • Make sure you specify who you are in this imagined situation. Are you an employee of your client? Are you an outside contractor hired to do this report? How did the task of writing this report come to you?

• Analysis of the Client’s Problem/Situation and Choices

• detailed descriptions of the options or course of action you will be researching and analyzing
  • Specify what type of analysis you intend to use (comparative, feasibility, or causal)
  • Include the specific criteria you will use in your analysis to evaluate the options or course of action

• Audience Analysis

• detailed descriptions of both your primary and secondary audiences (who will ultimately read the Analytical Report)
  • Include their background knowledge, reading preferences, etc. (look at audience profile examples from the textbook for help).
  • In addition to your primary audience (the client for whom you are writing this report), include your secondary audience (others within the company, higher up executives, the public, financiers, etc.); make sure your secondary audience is realistic for the rhetorical situation.
• Work Plan
  • Detail all major tasks you will need to accomplish in order to successfully write your report
    • Include all basic tasks, such as “conduct research,” “outline ideas,” “write a rough draft,” etc.
  • Format a schedule as a Gantt chart[1]
    • Include all the tasks from your work plan with your anticipated timeline for completing the tasks.
  • • Qualifications

• establish why you feel you will be capable of doing a good job with this project
  • Remember, for the Proposal, you are yourself, a real student in ENGL 202D, so consider what actually qualifies you to complete the Analytical Report, not why the imagined future version of you would be qualified.
  • This could be previous experience, classes you have taken or are currently taking, or even simply your research abilities.

• Resources Required to Complete the Project

• include an annotated bibliography with at least three sources you have already found, a complete APA citation for each source, a brief description of the source, and an explanation of how you intend to use it in your report
• if there are additional resources you intend to use, such as conducting actual tests of products, or visiting a location, include that information as well

 

• Closing

• Briefly express your final thoughts on the project and your plan

Daily Assignment: Report Topic Memo

Before putting together your proposal, write a short memo to me explaining your initial ideas about the project. This is not yet a full proposal, so you don’t have to have your plan completely figured out. You should, however, have some sense of what you are interested in exploring.

If you have a fairly clear idea of what you want to work on for this project, explain your topic. If you have a few possibilities you are considering, explain each and whether you are leaning in one direction or another.

Indicate any sense you have so far of what sources you are looking into or may want to use for the project.

Offer some sense of why the topic interests you. Remember, your goal with the Analytical Report assignment is to simulate a situation similar to what you may face in your career. Select a topic you feel invested in or that connects with your major or career goals.

This topic memo is a less formal document than the major assignments for the semester, but I still expect you to invest some time in composing this document and developing your ideas.