Using audience accommodation for effective and ethical communication

Abstract

Recent changes in engineering education have focused on improving students' communication skills and increasing their understanding of ethical dimensions of engineering practices. Unfortunately the interrelations between ethics and communication are often overlooked, and these connections can actually improve development of both skills sets. As engineering educators, we can play an important role in ensuring that our engineering graduates are able to address a wide range of audiences clearly with correct and complete information. By working to ensure our students have-and value-the ability to address a variety of audiences, we can help raise public knowledge on technical issues and thereby impact the ethical content of the decisions made on them. This paper introduces the fundamentals of audience analysis and demonstrates how these principles can be applied in engineering courses.