Your journal entry should describe a past act of communication in which your audience invoked did not match up with the audience addressed. How did they differ? Where do you think this difference came from (how did you come to invoke an audience that differed from the audience addressed)?
Your entry should consider how you might have invoked an audience in that rhetorical situation that more closely aligned with the audience addressed. What sort of rhetorical choices could you have made in your address that would have more accurately captured who the audience was?
I want to preface this by saying I don't have a single definitive instance where I, for example, presented a speech and the audience didn't align with what I had thought, or done stand-up comedy and the audience turned out to be unamused because say they ended up being a much older generation who didn't understand Gen-Z lingo. These examples would have been perfect, however, I have not experienced these myself. Instead, I present to you, a couple instances where my lack of better judgment got the best of me. In other words, the audience I invoked, not the audience that was addressed.
In high school, I took a world history class. This class was full of people just a year ahead of me, because I had transferred school districts and unknowingly surpassed my grade level in this particular subject. With that being said, I thought this group of people were smarter and more mature than me. The teacher required the students in this class to have socratic seminars quite often, to discuss lessons, and debate important events in history. During one of these seminars, I suggested that American public schools be year-round, with longer winter and spring breaks combined with shorter school days, instead of having a three month summer vacation. I argued that school systems in America are one of the only ones in the world to operate that way, resulting in less-educated kids, and students who have forgotten most of the prior years’ curriculum. To conclude, I reiterated that American students have average-to-low IQ scores when compared to other countries, leading me to believe that school sytems overseas are doing it right…year-round. These schools have the ability to attend to the students for more one-on-one time, and reduce student and faculty burnout by giving students a longer lunch break. It was to my suprise that my classmates, along with my world history teacher, chastised me for having this opinion, calling me a commie (communist). I didn't expect my peers to be so threatened by my opinion, I’ll be it, an educated one. Let alone, for my own teacher to call me a communist was a complete and total shock to me because I thought there was a zero-tolerance policy for these kinds of discrimination. I guess my audience invoked was an understanding, respectful, and educated group of individuals. However the audience addressed ended up being a disrespectful, politically-motivated one. I would have opted for a different approach to my argument, such as stating the positives for year-round schooling first instead of bashing US public schools first, if I had known the audience addressed.
One time, I went to a yoga retreat of sorts, a day trip kind of deal. There were pop up shops in tents that sold organic, gluten-free, and/or vegan products like clothes, toiletries, and yoga mats. Meanwhile, people were doing aerial yoga, and teaching meditation classes. I came across a group of zen looking people sitting criss-crossed on a mandala blanket playing odd instruments I’d never seen. Instantly intrigued, I went over to admire the music. I was invited to join them for a demo, where I was told what this weird microphone I saw does; it converts your voice into a beat. To demonstrate how it works, they asked me to say a word or phrase into the microphone. I couldn't think of anything on the spot so they gave me a prompt, “what did you have for lunch today?” I replied, “a cheeseburger.” The music stopped abruptly and the man doing the demo immediately gasped and said “Oh no we don't eat animals.” As you can imagine, the rest of that interaction was cripplingly awkward. Then I realized…you idiot, obviously youre at a vegan/anti-animal cruelty event! Why would you say that? Clearly oblivious to my surroundings, I quickly realized that the audience invoked did not, at all, match the audience addressed. If I would have read the room a bit better before I opened up my mouth, and said something like quinoa instead, things would have been much less awkward, and I would have avoided being looked at as some kind of cruel animal-hater.
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