Considering the audience

As an engineer, the majority of my writing highly technical. If I had applied the same Discourse Community Analysis to my and my classmates' writing, the conclusion would have been that the writing is highly specialized communication between peers. I had never really considered my audience when writing lab notebooks or lab reports, as my audience (largely professors, classmates and colleagues) have a similar knowledge base.

For the Public Writing piece, I took a topic I knew a lot about (from my coops and researched writing piece) and adapted it for a non-technical audience. It's really important for scientists and engineers to be able to communicate their work with other people - it's how we get funding, sell products and solve problems. I really learned a lot about how to communicate and make technical information more accessible to the general public through this assignment. It's not always easy and I now understand why science writers are so important!