The Audience Project: Writing for readers rather than writing for teachers

Research Question:

Students are used to producing writing that will be evaluated by a teacher or other authority figure. My research design focuses on altering student perspective on writing by focusing on audience and response. Bluntly: Can focusing on audience help students free their writing from the authority of the classroom?

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 classroom English for all of their assignments.

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 will also 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.

By using Peter Elbow’s “Map of Writing in Terms of Audience and Response” as my primary schema, I want to reorient student writing in my class toward audience.

Methods:

The map, along with some examples of what each type of writing will look like:

Audience	Sharing/No response	Response, no evaluation	Evaluation/Criticism
Authority	Present writing to the class	Read and respond like you would to an article	Grade
Peers	Share writing with a partner	Read a partner’s entry and respond	Peer editing
Allies	Correspondence	Writing Center Studio	NA
Self	Private journal entry	Read a past entry and respond to it	Self-evaluation

The study I propose will mostly involve routines built into every class day. As the map shows, journal entries can be used for a variety of different forms of audience writing. The students will be given a composition book on the first day, and every day in the classroom they will alternate between writing for self and writing for peers. These journals will be theirs to keep and I will never collect them – I will only make sure they are writing, I will not read or assess their journal entries. On computer days, we’re going to partner with Megan Lucchesi’s synchronous class to work on writing for allies. This will be based on WordPress posts and comments. The literacy narrative workshop will also be changed to an ally response workshop with Megan’s class.

I’m also planning to change all of the rubrics to make audience the top feature required for the major projects. This is part of the process of moving the reader to the front of the students’ minds as they complete their projects.

The final piece of the study will be a culminating presentation to allies, peers, and authority. Basically, the students will present a metanarrative of their quarter-long study of literacy, from their sponsor to their research to their webtext. They will then give this presentation to their ally, their peers, and finally the whole class with the teacher present. This project will also include a reflection on how to write for different audiences. This project will not replace the webtext, but it may require the field notes to be jettisoned as we move through the projects on an accelerated timeline. I also want class to end on more of a cumulative presentation rather than a website to emphasize our focus on audience.

Scholarship:

Nobody has written with more clarity about the need to write for an audience than Peter Elbow. The audience map from the methods section comes from a long chapter about audience in Everyone Can Write. Elbow wants students to build a foundation of safety by writing for audiences other than authority. He believes that low stakes writing makes students more confident, and that confidence can be utilized later in the term for higher stakes assignments. Low stakes writing can also help teachers by introducing them to each student’s writing in a way that allows them to read for content rather than correction, and also lowers the proofreading and editing burden to only a few assignments. Fewer high stakes assignments also help emphasize that high stakes assignments are not the most common form of writing, a misconception students have learned from years of educational experience.

More recent scholarship about teachers ceding some critical authority and responding to content comes from Ryder, Lei, and Roen’s “Audience Considerations for Evaluating Writing.” Taking the form of a manifesto, they argue that:

When we identify the “real” audience of a student essay as someone other than ourselves, we step out of the position of “judge” and into the position of “coach.” That is, instead of responding to a text by saying, “This is how it’s done; these are the rules,” we can say, “Your writing will probably affect your reader in X way,” and explain how the author might better reach that audience. We shift out of the role of “antagonist” and into the role of “supporter,” a role we like. More important, we believe we are more effective teachers when we can support students’ efforts to achieve their purpose for their readers. (54)

Being a writing coach, rather than assessor, can be achieved with the help of lower stakes, audience-based assignments in which students can practice without inhibition. They will learn that writing is about finding the most effective way to communicate rather than a judgment of their intelligence.

Peter Elbow also writes about audience in Writing with Power, where he describes how the audience has to do half the work – as though the writer steers the bicycle while the audience pedals (202). And what students must consider is that the reader can quit at anytime, and finding ways to make the reader want to keep pedaling might be a better way to think of writing than a task that must be completed for a teacher who gets paid to read it.

In “Understanding a Writer’s Awareness of Audience,” Carol Berkenkotter writes about the ways in which “professional writers automatically internalize their audiences” (396). Only through the process of a think-aloud exercise are we able to see the audience externalized. Although, students don’t have the same ability as these professional writers, they can be assisted in understanding audience by being put in a professional situation. Berkenkotter says that students can be given cases, as though they are lawyers, or sales numbers, as though they are in business, and reflect on how they would combine this information to suit particular audiences.

In Thomas Newkirk’s seminal studies of peer response, he echoes Elbow’s belief that teachers tend to act only as evaluators of technical writing quality while peers tend to focus more on the content. A teacher will more likely consider whether a certain paragraph is effective while a student will focus on what the paragraph is about. Newkirk writes that teachers focus on the window while students look at the view (309). When teachers behave more like peer evaluators, students will know that their work is being read with the respect of the peer rather than the antagonism of authority.

The scholarship generally points in the same direction, away from the teacher as authority and towards the teacher as reader-responder. Audience is the tool used to alter student writing in this direction. Students tend to write as though they are authorities when writing for authority, so having them write for different audiences allows them room to think and question their ideas without the stakes of assessment on quality of writing. By building daily low stakes writing lessons into my class, I’m hoping that students will view their writing as a work in progress that is open to experimentation, and their teacher as a supporter who will assist them in their efforts.

Conclusion:

I view this project as a work in progress, so I’m not planning to have students sign an informed consent or get IRB approval this winter. If the parts of the project that I’m planning to implement this winter – the routines, the allies correspondence, and the culminating presentations – are successful, then I may go forward with a more formal study in the spring. I’m excited to see how the focus on audience will change student writing in my class, and also develop a theme we can center our class around throughout the quarter.