Topic speculation

Do students tailor what they write for different audiences? My research will seek to answer how audience plays a role in student compositions in English 101.

I think that students generally write for the same audience in all of their classes – the authority figure. Despite telling them that they should carefully consider the reader of each work they are creating, including those like the e-mail and the poster that are generally meant for a student audience, students are prone to write the same, essentially standard English for all of their assignments.

My belief, and I’m still working on researching this, is that audience is not necessarily at the top of the student’s mind when writing in a composition class. They are so conditioned by past school experiences to always write “school essays” for every writing assignment. When they sit down to write, the primary thought in their head is how to convey information or make an argument, and the consideration of audience is pushed to the back of their mind. What I would like to do as a research project is to see how different student writing would be if I foregrounded audience as the primary factor rather than a secondary consideration.

I also want to examine the connection between audience and genre. Students are allegedly learning to write in different genres, which means they should be considering the audience of each genre, but they are information focused and they don’t consider how they should craft writing differently depending on the audience for the particular genre in which they are creating a text. Genre is connected to audience in so much as we can’t think about why a piece of writing should be done in a different context without considering all aspects of that context, but audience is rarely the primary focus of writing across genres.

Considering audience, being mindful through the writing process of who is reading a text and why they are reading it, certainly is an important component of becoming a good writer. My project will seek to understand how students would write differently if audience were foregrounded as the most important aspect of a piece of writing.

Resources

My primary resource I have used so far to understand audience in the college classroom comes from the wildly famous clown prince of composition studies himself, Peter Elbow. His “Map of Writing” chapter in Everyone Can Write lays a foundation for the variety of audiences students should consider when writing.

Further resources may or may not include:

Anderson, Vivienne; Karen Fitts. (1989). Awakening students to rhetorical process: Audience, ethos, and anonymity in journal correspondence. Journal of Teaching Writing 08.1,

Asher, Deborah L.. (1983). Response to Carol Berkenkotter, ‘Understanding a Writer’s Awareness of Audience’. College Composition and Communication 34.2, 214-216.

Atkinson, Nancy Garrett. (1970). Rhetorical point of view: The manipulation of audience and ‘speaking voice’ to improve student writing [masters thesis]. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University.

Khost, Peter H.. (2016). “‘Alas Not Yours to Have’: Problems with Audience in High-Stakes Writing Tests, and the Promise of Felt Sense.”. Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, vol. 21, no. 1, 47-68.

McIntyre, Megan. (2018). Productive uncertainty and postpedagogical practice in first-year writing. Prompt 2.2, 39-48.

Walker, B. J. (2003). The cultivation of student self-efficacy in reading and writing. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 19(2), 173–187.

Potential Methodology

I think an experiment in which students work on writing each project, or versions of each project, for a different, but very specific audience [likely from Elbow’s map]. My premise is that focusing primarily on audience when assigning writing will cause students to actually think more deeply about their reader. I would expect the projects to turn out different than my current students’ essays. One sticking point is that so many projects are also in separate genres and separate mediums that focusing on audience will inevitably find its way to the background as students focus on design and software. That’s why I’m considering focusing only on the literacy narrative and having students choose [or be assigned] a specific audience for whom to write this assignment. In Elbow’s terms, that would mean authority, peers, allies, or self. Obviously, any work done in my class is ostensibly geared towards the teacher by the structures in place. To get around that, I would have to change the means of assessment to something like Pass/Fail [which it already is, in a way] and tell students that I will not actually read what they have written for grading purposes, but only to make sure it has been written. [I’m still fuzzy on the details of this idea].