The audience is one of the key parts to analyzing a rhetorical situation. Any audience that might be interested in a civil engineering controversy, especially the controversy of the Keystone XL Pipeline, would be a person who is interested in civil engineering especially someone interested in pipeline construction. These people can come from all sorts of backgrounds and people types but they would be deeply interested in constructing the nations infrastructure. Other people that might be involved would be politicians or people who live in the towns in which the proposed pipeline would traverse. These people would likely want to know the pros and cons of the controversy and how it would affect their daily lives. These people would likely be interested in reading local newspapers and magazines as well as reading articles about the political ideas of the project from political magazines. Many of these people would be from the midwest United States and would possibly have rural backgrounds of farming and ranching. Other people would be highly concerned with the wide open ranges of the midwest. Many engineers would be from large engineering firms, many of the politicians would be representatives of the states in which the pipeline would be built, and many of the local people interested in this controversy would live near the proposed pipeline path or have direct impact to land near the pipeline. Many of these people would be concerned with preserving rural and small town lifestyle while still seeking an economic boom. They might not care about the economic boom for big oil business or for large urban cities.
The purpose of this project is important to developing a well thought-out project. This project should inform the audience of both sides to the controversy as well as explaining why it is a controversy. A reader should be able to pick out why both sides feel passionate about the controversy and walk away feeling informed about the issue while being able to make their own decision about the controversy. Any audience member might miss the impact that this project has on the workers who were supposed to build the pipeline. The project has become so highly politicized that many people will only see it as a political issue not an issue of real people in real communities in rural locations looking for work. This is why it is important that certain readers understand that this isnt just some political argument, there are real people involved and real jobs at stake. In fact entire town's economies could be affected by the construction of this pipeline, these are the true stakeholders in the controversy. This project could be even more of a controversy if it was located in a more urbanized location, however because it is located in a rural location some people tend to forget about the humans and animals that will be affected by the construction of this pipeline. This controversy has been ongoing for several years now, dating back almost 4 to 5 years. As such it has had time to blossom into a full scale controversy, with highly developed arguments on either side. This is important for the audience to understand; this controversy has been around for a couple years and now looks as if it might be revived again.
As the author of this project, I feel that I could bring a fresh look into the controversy. This controversy has slowly become more political than the project should have been. All civil engineering projects are going to have some level of political controversy, however this one project has become so highly politicized that it may no longer ever be feasible to be built. As a prospective civil engineer I hope to not only look at the political reasons for civil engineering controversies but also the feasibility of building such a large pipeline. I'm extremely interested in building infrastructure but I also am interested in the opinions of the people that these infrastructure projects will be affecting. Thus I feel that I can offer a new fresh look at the facts of the controversy without much bias because I will be considering the people involved. Not many other people would be willing to take a look at such a politically charged controversy so that is why I will try to tackle this controversy.
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| Anonymous, "Author" via Blue Diamond Gallery CCO license |
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