Audience and Genre

The next step is for me to understand my rhetorical situation for this project.  Here, I've brainstormed some ideas regarding audience, and come up with examples of media types that would be best for those audiences.  Since my topic is pretty narrow, the options of who the audience is are pretty limited, and revolve around local people in Tucson, who would be most interested in understanding if Tucson is adequately prepared for drought.

Ossanna, Lia. "Screenshot of online Star editorial." 10/24/15 via
http://tucson.com/news/opinion/ua-faculty-staff-pay-far-behind-market
-rate/article_26063c1e-e44b-581a-8eb5-3a956208ed45.html

The first potential audience I have is political city figures who are in charge of drafting the drought preparedness plans.  I could make a public argument indicating where their current plan is weak, and how it should be fixed.  This way I'm speaking directly to the people who are in charge of implementing the most change.  City council people have a responsibility to serve the people of their community, and I would be addressing a critical issue, so they would be interested.

The first place I could publish or present my research would be in the form of a letter to my council people in charge of the issue.  The letter would include the important points of my research distilled into language that those without a strong background would still understand.  This way I would be directly contacting the council members in a typical way most citizens communicate with their city council.  Examples of letters to city council members can be found here, here and here.

The second place I could publish my argument would be the op-ed section of the Arizona Daily Star.  Since this is a local newspaper, those reading it would be affected by the issue, and informed that I was attempting to communicate with the city council about the issue.  For an op-ed piece, I would have to explain how this issue is pertinent to all of Tucson and worth spending time thinking about.  I would have to connect the idea more closely to the general public of Tucson.  Op-ed pieces generally share firm beliefs, giving some background about the past as well as describing what the current situation is.  Op-ed pieces address less of how to solve a problem, and instead are used to bring awareness about an issue.  Examples of op-ed pieces from the Star can be found here and here (note that I don't endorse the beliefs presented in this article).

As for the second potential audience, I could focus on engaging the local academic community that would be interested about the environmental effects and conservation strategies currently in place.  These people would most likely consist of professors in the hydrology department at the U of A.

In talking to these UA professors, I could go about talking the issue in a different way and present the information in a video format, with narration and shots of relevant parts, like Tucson Water or the Tucson Aqueduct.  The purpose of the video would be to prove that drought preparedness is an important issue to focus on.  This video could then be used to inform the public about the issue.  National Geographic makes videos like this; examples can be found here and here.  However, this it is unlikely I will execute this idea, because I have little skill in making videos or animation, and prefer writing.

Another way I could communicate with the academic sphere is by a short research proposal.  This wouldn't be as extensive as normal research proposals, but would rather focus on stating the issue at hand, some background knowledge, and then ask for help from these professors to expand this idea into an actual research proposal and plan.  I won't have enough information to actually compose the research plan myself, and that's not really a public argument, but instead I could sort of write a proposal to a research proposal.  Examples of short research proposals can be found here and here.

As an end note, I was trying to be more creative with my last two ideas regarding my second audience, but in reality those ideas will probably be more difficult to execute, and might not come across as clear public arguments.  The two ideas I had before for the first audience are probably what I will begin exploring.