- For my response to this question, I chose to focus on “Shaping and Ethical Workplace Culture” because of the way the authors present information in a way that will make it usable for the readers of the article. I believe that the intended audience of this article is anyone in the workplace. In this article, the authors process what they have learned and make it actionable to the reader by typing main ideas in green, including bullet points that help explain their claims in an understandable way, including graphs and charts, and adding examples. All of these things that are incorporated into the article allow the reader to easily find the purpose of this article, and make the information easy to understand so that the suggestions being made can be taken by the readers. For example, on the side of page 9, there is a block of green titled, “Hallmarks of an Ethical Workplace” with a bulleted list of things that make a workplace ethical. This allows the reader to get an idea of what an ethical workplace is supposed to be. This block of ideas is actionable because it says things like, “Employees feel empowered and energized to reach for ethical and technical excellence in serving customers, clients and each other” (p. 9). When an employee or leader looks at this bullet point, they can reach out to employees and/or take a look at what they are doing as a leader, and think about what they can do to make their employees feel empowered at work.
- Some of the options that I have begun to consider for my unit 3 assignment include:
- having parents/guardians be my target audience, explain to them what it means to be inclusive, and give them examples of the benefits of inclusive classrooms → the readers would probably engage with a presentation/essay the best, and would most likely expect a longer text with lots of detail and explanation, as well as examples.
- Having young students be my target audience, and find a way to explain inclusion and differences to them in a way that they can understand → the readers would likely engage with their teachers or parents through a story, powerpoint, song, etc. because it may help them understand the information better. The readers of this topic, since the target audience is young, may expect a short, colorful, and interactive source or presentation.
- Having teachers be my target audience, and give them suggestions/advice about how to successfully teach an inclusive classroom → the readers would likely engage with a presentation, essay, etc. The target audience may expect a longer essay with a lot of examples and evidence that proves the point being stated.
Writing and organizational cultures
You’ve identified 3 very different possible audiences here (all of them interesting and worthy), and as you weigh which 1 you’d like to address, consider what purpose you hope to accomplish with this text. Given what you want to focus on and argue for, who would it make sense to address?
Let me know what questions you have and if you’d like to talk through this some more.
Dominique, I think your analysis on the article of “Shaping an Ethical Workplace Culture” is spot on. I too appreciated the way it was organized with main subject headlines and green bulleted text. These strategies helped me easily find the purpose of the article and think of ways to conceptualize my unit 3 assignment in a similar format. As for a comment on your second question, I really liked the way you thought of different audiences and gave specific examples of how to address them. One thing I might consider would be hybridizing the first and second you listed as a means of including more of an intended audience population (I might do this for mine!).