Audience Analysis with Cereal Boxes

Materials: Cereal boxes (4 or 5, depending on class size); slides with discussion questions (or strips of paper with discussion questions; drawing paper); pencils, crayons, markers

Part 1: Cereal Box Challenge

1. Revisit the rhetorical situation with attention to exigence, writers, and purposes. 

2. Divide the class into teams of 3 or 4 students per team. Early in the semester, it may be useful to assign roles so that every student feels comfortable participating. I usually have the following roles: notetakers, speakers, and time keepers. 

3. Provide every team a box of cereal. 

4. Instruct students to use the information on the cereal box to construct a description of the intended audience. The following questions may be useful:

• Who is the intended audience?

• Who would likely buy the cereal? Is this the same as the intended audience?

• What can you infer about the audience? Think about their age, social identity or groups, and possible interests. 

• How does the box appeal to the audience? 

• What evidence from the box led to your conclusion?

5. Instruct students to sketch an image of their intended audience purchasing the cereal. 

Part 2: Discussion 

Give each team 3 to 5 minutes to describe their box of cereal and audience profile. As teams share, point out differences between the boxes and the subtle ways the design choices give hints about who would be most likely to want and/or purchase the cereal. 

Part 3: Independent Writing

Instruct students to respond to the prompt:

Consider your audience for this project. Who are they? What are their interests? Why are they reading (or viewing) your text? What might they need or expect from your writing?

What choices are you making in your text to meet the needs of your audience? What changes might you need to make?