Describes a teaching unit designed to help students discover the interaction of writer, subject, and audience. Reviews the major types of writing used in the unit and the various audiences for whom the students wrote. (FL)

A study explored the complexities of audience adaptation by examining the relationships between writer/audience proximity, register, and overall quality in essays written for assigned audiences. Subjects, 100 college freshmen, each wrote one essay in response to two audience-specified tasks in which subjects were to write persuasive letters to…

The design of a program for teaching audience awareness proceeds in a clear and logical order so that it can be incorporated into any writing syllabus concerned with traditional matters of form. The program begins with a brief questionnaire designed to elicit student problems with and feelings about audience. Class discussion of the questionnaire…

Presents a sequence of writing assignments in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and members of a rhetoric class that calls attention to the crucial relation between the writer and the audience. (JL)

Suggests the value of a prewriting sheet which asks remedial students to specify an occasion, audience, and purpose for each of their one-paragraph papers. (DD)

Describes a three-step communications loop involving student self-descriptions that promote greater audience awareness. (RL)

Suggests that few references to the important issues of audience awareness exist in news writing textbooks and that technical writing literature can fill this gap. Identifies two main aspects of audience awareness, three key reasons why it should be taught to journalists, and gives audience types. Provides classroom exercises. (MS)

Prewriting, critical probe questions, and post-writing-recasting for plural audiences-(audience-relating) are three tactics that can be used in research paper instruction to help college students gain skill in "real world" writing and in critical assessment of issues and evidence. The prewriting tactics of freewriting, listing specifics,…

Objects assembled in nonrepresentational fashion from tinker toy pieces are the starting point for a technical description writing assignment designed to increase the students' awareness of audience while at the same time giving them practice in description, analysis, and active judgment. Having been separated into two groups, each facing a…

Two exercises that can be used with journalism students to help them clarify and think through the editorial process are the repertory grid and the coorientation model. A technique developed in England by the followers of psychologist George Kelly, the repertory grid asks students to rank ten or twelve authors on criteria such as social…

The English department of a technical college has developed a writing program that uses real audiences and real situations to better prepare students for the communication requirements of their professions. The exercises for each class are focused on the course content. In an advanced technical communication course, senior design, the students are…

Explains how providing a general theme and a varied audience for writing helped improve student research papers. (FL)

A cooperative writing workshop that attempts to engage first-term college freshmen in a variety of genuine writing problems by stressing the class as audience, the use of daily journals, feedback from small group discussions, and frequent revision is described in the first part of this document. The remainder of the paper presents a case study of…