Of all the rhetorical terms we’ve discussed throughout the semester, audience and tone have been most impactful to me. Both terms tie into each other in that one’s audience affects the tone with which to approach the matter at hand; this effect has been quite useful in my own writing, particularly the Composition in Two Genres assignment. In order to convey the message that the stigma against veganism is unwarranted to the audience of non-vegans holding negative biases against vegans and vegans themselves who want to learn about why such a stigma exists, I ensured the tone and presentation of my genres to be contrasting, one light-hearted and somewhat satirical and the other more informative and straight-forward. Besides that specific assignment, I’ve used audience and tone in both my source-based and inquiry-based research essays. While my first essay did not demonstrate the best usage of rhetorical strategies, the second essay showed improvement. In my inquiry-based essay, I tried to have a serious tone without complicated language so that the audience would be more open to the information being presented as it was an opposing viewpoint to their bias. This paved the pathway for the deciding factor in what genres to choose for the Composition in Two Genres assignment.

The use of audience and tone has been used outside of class as well. I’ve used them when writing emails to professors with a certain intent. My audience is an authority figure who I am emailing for information about an assignment and therefore I keep my tone respectful and straightforward, addressing them cordially. In another situation, I am having an argument with my sister. Here, I am speaking to someone familiar with who I speak with every day and this my tone is much more relaxed if not slightly agitated, language filled with slang rather than English with proper grammar.