In my chosen article, “Sports: Men and Women react differently to a missing audience”, it gives a view on both men and women sports and how they have different reactions when it comes to the audience at their sporting events. Throughout this assignment, I will be summarizing what this blog post is about and the main message it is trying to convey, the rhetorical situation of the blog, and my opinion on how effective it is to a non-expert audience. There is no doubt that men’s sports usually get a bigger audience compared to women's sports. It has been like that for a very long time but the thing that has changed is the way they react to the audience. 

This blog post sends out a clear message with how men and women react to a missing audience during their sporting event. With the pandemic that has occurred and is still happening today, it has put a huge toll on the audience at sporting events. For example, depending on if they are even allowed to have an audience, or if people were staying home for their own health and safety, it has changed drastically. People were either not allowed to be at sporting events and other people were being cautious and would rather have stayed home and watched it on tv. The athletes have taken notice of it and therefore have performed differently because of it. The main message that this study is trying to prove is that the missing audience can cause men to run slower and women to run faster. "To our knowledge, this is the first time that a study was able to show a different effect of the audience on men and women," says Professor Oliver Stoll who is the head of sports psychology at MLU. It is also thought out that gender-specific stereotypes play a big part of the results in this study. There are always going to be stereotypes in the world of sports but it is all about how you handle them. 

Thinking about the rhetorical situation, it is described in 5 parts. The purpose, audience, topic, writer, and context. The purpose of this blog post is to show how a missing audience physically and mentally affects men and women athletes at their sporting events. It can cause the athletes to develop mental health issues from the lack of people watching, or it can also cause physical effects as in perseverance. If there is not an audience, then they may not believe they have to try as hard to impress anyone. On the other hand, they also may not get that drive of energy that would push them to go further. The audience can vary from athletes themselves to men and women, or anyone who is interested in learning more about it. The topic is about athletes and sports psychology. There are multiple writers and professors that have come together and contributed their professional views and research on the study and how they can back it up and support their theory. The context is proven for men and women athletes and how they should always consider gender with these types of studies. 

This blog post can be very effective to a non-expert audience because it is very informative and also gives the audience something they are mostly interested in with some cases. Sports is very popular in the world and a wide population of people are interested in sports and how much it has evolved over the years. It gives insight on how athletes can perform differently with and without an audience and how covid has been a part of the sports world and how people handle it differently. It is something that not everyone thinks about but would be great if everyone knew. As the world goes on, sports won’t die. It will continue to go on with more additions and more athletes with higher expectations. 

With all of these different aspects of the rhetorical situation in this blog post, the blog post made it clear that men and women react differently to a missing audience. This is proved by the main message the blog post is putting out, the rhetorical situation within the blog post, and how it can be effective to a non-expert audience. I know for me, it is something that I never knew and never thought of and now that I know more about it, it widens my understanding on how important an audience is and how it can mentally and physically change the performance between men and women athletes at their events. The study gave a lot of good information and can most likely change views that some people already had on the topic and support it to where they can see how the audience can actually make a difference and give them something they have never thought about before.