These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
With your research partner(s), examine your magazine carefully to answer the following questions about the readers of that magazine. You may not need to answer every question below, but you should be able to answer most of them to develop a thorough and thoughtful picture of the readers. Once you have finished analyzing the magazine's readers, develop a strategy for selling one of the following products to that audience: sneakers, bottled water, shampoo, cellular phone service. Be prepared to present your audience analysis and your advertisement strategy to the class.
1. What does the title of the publication tell you about the readers of this magazine?
2. What do the cover stories suggest about the interests, values, assumptions, and concerns of those readers?
3. What kind of people speak/write in this magazine? What are their credentials? Academic or professional backgrounds?
4. What are the characteristics of the assumed audience? What are their values? What do they do on Saturday night? What do they do on Sunday morning? What is their most valuable possession? Who is the most important person in their lives? What experiences do they treasure?
5. What are the audience's needs assumed to be? To what use(s) is the audience expected to put the information contained in the magazine?
6. Why does this magazine exist (to entertain, persuade, educate, discuss, inform, present research findings, question earlier studies, add to those earlier studies)?
7. What are the beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, and/or assumptions of the addressed audience? You might look at advertisements to determine what the readers value, believe in, assume.
8. How much education do most of the readers of this magazine have? How do you know this?
9. What kinds of stories (articles, information) does this magazine contain? What's (or who's) left out?
10. What are some of the rules for writing in this magazine? Examine basic stylistic stuff: do they introduce people as Mr. or Mrs.? Do writers in this magazine use primarily last names, first names, or nicknames? How do they cite their sources of quotes and information? Do they use contractions (aren't rather than are not)? Do they use slang? Do they use sentence fragments, subheadings, pictures, graphs, bullets, etc? Do they write mostly in first, second, or third person? What specialized language is used (jargon, technical terms, formal or standard English, slang)?
11. Do writers assume their readers will know certain things (like names of important people, background into important events, works, movements)? What kinds of background information would you need to fully engage in a conversation with this magazine's readers?
12. Are texts in this forum written in passive (an experiment was conducted) or active voice (we conducted an experiment)? Why?
13. Examine the pictures included in articles and advertisements. What races, genders, ages, classes, etc are represented the most? What are people in these pictures doing?
Once you have developed a thorough understanding of the readers of your magazine, develop an advertisement for one of the products above. You may sketch out the ad or simply discuss what the advertisement will look like and say and how that ad will address/persuade the magazine's readers. You will present both your analysis and your advertisement to the class.
These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.