(CM 1145) Purpose and Audience

My class and I did an activity on purpose and audience last week and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Our teacher handed out two pieces of paper that had an intended audience on one sheet and an argument on the other. Our job was to somehow link the argument with the audience we were given. My audience was a grade six class and I had to argue the fact that eating meat should be banned. Now at first I was confused and I couldn't think of any way to link the two together, but then I started asking myself questions: What do they need to know? What do I want them to understand most? And how can I interest them in my topic and to understand my argument?

After asking myself these questions I started thinking about how young and impressionable my audience is. They are children; they don’t understand the ways of the world yet. My strategy going into this activity was to scare my audience. I came up with a bunch of ways to convince this grade six class to agree that eating meat should be banned. Some of these ways are:

•  Children love animals, tell them that every time they bite into a piece of meat, they are helping kill innocent animals
• Show them videos of animal abuse and slaughter houses
•  Bambi is a deer, would you eat Bambi?
• Turn the situation around and put the children in the animal’s shoes. What if you were an animal and someone was trying to kill and eat you? Does that make it right?
• You can get food poisoning from meat, such as raw chicken
• Children sometimes have pets at home; if they happen to have a pet rabbit that they love dearly, ask them if they would eat it. Have you ever had rabbit stew?
• There are only so many animals in the world and they can only reproduce so fast. We, as in everybody in the world, are slowly reducing the animal population by killing and eating meat.  By 2090 some breeds of animals could be extinct due to our meat intake. (It could happen, you never know!)

I think my strategy was perfect because my audience is extremely impressionable at that age, and by making them aware of these things sooner in life, it will ultimately affect them in the future and hopefully they will do something about it.

“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.” -Thomas Edison