Transforming the Audience

When analyzing rhetoric, one must always take into account what type of audience there is. By definition, an audience is a group of people who are watching, listening, or reading a specific discourse, such as a performance, book, or speech. In rhetorical terms, the audience significantly shapes the content and response of every argument. There are two parts to a rhetorical audience. One is the factual audience, which is composed of the actual audience, as they exist currently. Second is the fictional audience, better described as who the rhetorician would like the audience to become. A rhetorician’s overarching goal is to transform their audience, from a factual group to a fictional one. When determining what type of audience exists, it is best to consider the setting, occasion, and substance of the written or spoken composition. A rhetorician tries to write or speak in order to convince others of what they believe; hence, in order to do so successfully, a rhetorician must adequately evaluate their audience and anticipate all the possible reactions there could be to the argument they are developing.

Rhetoric is focused around directing one’s words in a persuasive and convincing manner towards the appropriate audience. In my documentary, “The DU Bridge Community Garden”, I took my audience into consideration while deciding on the specific content of my film. The central topic of my documentary helped to narrow down my targeted factual audience. Since the main subject of the film is focused on the University of Denver’s community garden, my main audience would be anyone affiliated with the DU campus. This could include DU students, faculty, administrators, nearby neighbors and alumni. Also, it is important to not get too specific and to remember that this overall idea of a community garden could be applied to other campuses or communities around the world. Therefore, my secondary factual audience could include other college students, faculty, and neighbors, as well as anyone interested in learning about the sustainable side of gardening and all the potential it holds.

After determining my factual audience, I used this information to figure out how to plan out the design and presentation of my interviews in such a way that will successfully change my audience. I wanted my film to transform my factual audience into people who are not only aware of current environmental issues and projects, such as a community garden, but who are also committed to changing the world. I thought it would be very effective and useful to show interviews of current University of Denver students. This helps to draw a direct connection to my primary audience, other DU students. The audience could see that their peers were not only knowledgeable on this subject, but passionate as well, hopefully initiating a change and interest in my factual audience.

In the rest of my documentary, I interviewed two students and two community neighbors involved in the original garden growth process. I did this to connect to the targeted factual audience pertaining to the campus and surrounding area community. Again, I hoped that by showing how current community and students were interested and involved in the environmental and community aspect of the garden, the factual audience could transform into my desired fictional one. My documentary as a whole teaches the audience about what the DU community garden is, who is involved, what people can learn from it, how it impacts the sense of community, and how the idea of it all can have a larger application in the world. By learning all this, I want my audience to apply what they’ve learned and to begin to get involved in this community garden, or ones like it. The ultimate goal is for them to take away the facts they learned from my documentary and apply them in their own communities, or even apply them around the world.