Analysis of my Rhetorical Situation

It's a scorching summer day in Mojave Desert, and you think that it can't be any worse outside. Next thing you know, a bird drops out of the sky and hits you on the head, burned by the solar flux you help maintain. A common occurrence, or common myth?

Harris, Steven "Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System" 2/3/14 via wikimedia. Public Domain.

1. Analyze your audience. 

As I get closer to beginning my first drafts of my quick reference guide about Ivanpah, I have come to realize that the audience for this project has the potential to be very vast. It can cover anyone interested in renewable energy since it talks about solar power, anyone in my field who is looking for new topics in electrical engineering, and environmentalists who believe that Ivanpah is causing more harm than it is good. The readers will generally be familiar with the topic, but will not have a deep understanding and are looking to further their knowledge. This can be casual readers trying to find something new or possibly even students such as myself looking to do research on the topic, looking for a good source to use themselves. Since the genre is a printed quick reference guide, the readers can be of almost any age as long as they are familiar with technology. They will likely value good information and become quickly disinterested if the paper takes too much time to read since it is supposed to provide a summary of key events.

2. Analyze your purpose.

While writing my quick reference guide, my main purpose will be to inform readers about the conflict that surrounded Ivanpah Solar Plant, and help show the importance of good information within an argument, something that was in short supply in the early days of the controversy. As the story is so recent, it was very easy for misinformation to spread quickly across the internet, with a wildly overestimated death count playing into public perception of the event. In my QRG, I also hope to show how the stakeholders such as BrightSource Energy and environmentalists each had a great deal to gain from winning the argument, something a reader with only cursory knowledge may not know.

3. Analyze your author.

Hi, I'm Coby Allred, a freshman electrical engineering student at the University of Arizona. Though I don't have any professional writing experience, I believe that my strong desire to learn more about my field makes me an excellent author for my piece on Ivanpah. Since controversies such as this one are bound to exist when I join the industry, I know that the my own interest in the topic at hand will cause me to write a piece that I'm proud of, and one that is going to be very informative to the reader.