Analysis of My Rhetorical SItuation

     The rhetorical situation of any sort of writing, whether actual physical writing or another form of media, is important to consider. Understanding the context for a work before even making it insures that the work will fit to what the author wishes to make it. The rhetorical situation of a work is the purpose, author, and audience to the work within the context of the story.

Who Are You?
       The audience to any work is probably the most important part, because the audience are especially concerned with the purpose of the work. For my rhetorical situation the audience is specific to not only those who are interested in neuroscience but also those who are willing to read about statistical analysis and actually understand its significance. The people who will read my quick reference guide on the low statistical power of neuroscience studies most likely will have read the original discourse papers; or have a good knowledge about at least the original main source for the controversy and want a breakdown of the arguments against or supporting it.
      The ethnographic breakdown for my audience, or what I can assume of it, will be comprised of educated individuals, I would assume at least some college education. While I would prefer to believe that its possible that there will be an equal amount of men and women reading the reference guide it is more probable that there will be a higher percentage of men reading because there is still a propensity for males to be in STEM fields. I would assume most of them would reside in America because that is where I am posting the work from. It will probably be important to them that my information is accurate, as well as my analysis. It is actually quite daunting to write for such a group that would most likely have studied these cases more thoroughly and understand them better than I.

Kennisland. "Audience" 04/04/2005 via Flickr.
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

Why Write at All?
      My purpose for writing this quick reference guide is that I want people to be able to make educated decisions on whether or not they should trust the reliability of studies conducted in neuroscience, without an entire dissection of the controversy like I plan on doing and coalescing, the audience would have to go through each source individually to make a decision. While they should perhaps still do that if the topic is truly so intriguing to them I want to give them an easier time of it. The audience needs to not only understand the study but also the reasons it is so important to the world around them; this study on statistical power could change how neuroscientific studies are conducted and may change what the world now understands about the brain.
      I'm concerned that otherwise the audience may not understand the significance or perhaps they would be confused by some of the extreme statistical information presented within the sources of the controversy.

Who Am I?
     Me being the author of this quick reference guide definitely affects the rhetorical situation of the work. What I personally bring to this work is my own experiences with statistical works and statistical power; it helps me understand the original works better and I can put an interpretation on the works that may not be out already in the world. My specific interest in this topic relates to the research aspect; my aspiration in life right now is to go into research in the field of neuroscience so this topic is very important to me, I want to understand how such things as statistical power truly affect what I want to do, this makes me a good candidate for writing this piece because I have a distinct interest in understanding the controversy in simple terms as much as the audience reading my piece might.