Inside Out Strategies for Teaching Writing Ch. 7

Growing Toward a Sense of Audience

"When students write only to teachers, they often end up writing not as the act of communicating to people but as performing for a grade," Peter Elbow. I'm not really good at teaching audience to my students. I try to make them aware of audience and ask them who are they writing for. The general response is for you, the teacher. For the most part, I believe they essentially are writing for me and for a grade, which makes their writing one dimensional. I need to figure out a way to take their writing outside the classroom and make their writing not just for me or a grade, but a wider audience.

The main point of writing is to what is written by the writer to the audience. What some call the rhetorical triangle consists of the writer, text, and audience. The authors assert that "an acute sense of audience is one of the hallmarks of a mature writer."

Different audiences to write to:

• Peers
• teachers
• Parents, relatives, principals, local community
• Editors, authors, athletes, governmental bodies, corporations
• Imaginary characters: from books, TV, videos, or film

Exercises for growing a sense of audience.

• Have students speak directly to the audience; address them in the text.
• Anticipate audience response: have students write a persuasive piece that addresses someone they want something from. Using their knowledge about who they are addressing craft a message that anticipates any questions or concerns they may have.
• Personalizing an audience: have students imagine who their audience is as part of the pre-writing stage. Let them think about their beliefs, where they live, what is their education, or how old they are.
• Rewriting for different audience. Ask students about effective commercials and analyze one in class, discussing the types of appeals that were used and who their intended audience is. Then have students take the same product and rewrite another commercial for a different audience.
• Writing for younger children: connect with a lower grade level teacher and have your students visit that class and interview their audience for what kind of stories they like. Then ask your students to write a story for their audience. Ideally your students will go back to the same class and read their stories to the younger students or you can video tape and send tape to elementary level.
• Audience adaptation: Haves students write to three different people describing a car accident: one to a relative of the driver, one to a police officer, and one to the owner of the automobile company of the car that was driven.
• Real Audiences: Basically make your students work shine. Don't let the final product end with the you, the teacher and evaluator of work. Have students read their writing aloud to classmates or publish their work outside of class.

The main idea is to not let student writing end with you. It has to go beyond the grader and the writer and for others to hear. The authors of this book has made this point several times throughout the text and as far as I'm concerned I hear them loud and clear. At the very least I will ask my students to read their final products to a classmate and for pieces that are awesome ask to have them read aloud in class and perhaps in our school's morning bulletin to broadcast to the school. This makes the writing experience authentic and real, contrary to another class assignment.