Describes how a short exercise in designing greeting cards for a "Teacher Appreciation Day" helps student identify and analyze the four components of rhetoric--purpose, content, persona, and audience. Includes samples of students' greeting card messages. (MM)

Focusing on satisfying the theatrical feature film audience, this book provides writers with the tools necessary to successfully create and market a screenplay. It includes "scribble exercises" every few pages--specific activities and questions to stir readers' reactions. Chapters in the book are: (1) Drama Is Conflict; (2) Satisfying…

Suggests strategies for applying Kenneth Burke's theories of rhetoric and dialectic to technical writing instruction. Shows how teachers can use Burke's dialectic heuristic, the Pentad, to analyze writing situations they present to students. Describes how writers can use Burke's concept of "identification" as a strategy for analyzing and…

Describes an exercise designed to help student writers expand beyond writer-based prose by having them write for a particular magazine or newspaper audience. (MM)

This book is aimed at those who want to record personal stories, or for family and friends, or for fulfillment of higher literary standards. It is a book to open up conversations about memoir and a practical guide to the craft, the personal challenges, and the ethical dilemmas of writing true stories. The chapters deal with getting started,…

Presents results of a six-week research project in a creative writing class that focused on developing audience sensitivity among students. Describes three units combining social, rhetorical, and informational perspectives. Concludes that a sequential approach seems to increase audience sensitivity among students. (KEH)

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)

Epideictic rhetoric, expression of praise or blame, animates much communication, from gossip to sermons, from commercial ads to love letters. Even when writing for purposes other than to judge, writers often frame their talk with implicit or explicit expressions of praise for individuals or groups or ideas considered "good." Epideictic…

A study classified 61 writing assignments from 10 undergraduate science and technology courses on the basis of audience and task specifications. Most assignments emphasized reporting on specific participatory experiences, and 25 percent of assignments specified an audience other than the course instructor. Pedagogical implications for…

While recent arguments often propose that students should be engaged as writers in service to the larger community, the question remains how to engage students as intellectuals, writers, and creators of knowledge in an intellectual setting that mostly asks them to be passive learners. In Project Renaissance, leaving behind the familiar boundaries…

A teacher presents a writing exercise designed to facilitate audience-directed, critical thinking during the process of composing, that starts students thinking in terms of sorites and enthymemes. Students first read a CIA manual, "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare," that instructs the Contra guerrillas in illegal acts and…

Based on the idea that to beat the competition and impress college admissions officers a student must write a first-rate college application, this guide provides easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions for applications that get results. The guide contains worksheets, checklists, and examples that will help the student in the admissions process.…

This book provides a theoretical underpinning for the strategy of freewriting through a collection of 16 essays that are very diverse in focus, methodology, and point of view. The essays are as follows: "Recording and Transforming: The Mystery of the Ten-Minute Freewrite" (Sheryl I. Fontaine); "Freewriting: An Aid to Rereading…

Plain talk is the cornerstone for creating a classroom atmosphere in which students want to learn to improve their writing. As much as possible, the jargon and technical terminology of the profession of English should be eliminated. Teachers will know what level of language to use if they determine the nature of their audience. Teachers have to…

Self-evaluation is unfamiliar to most college students. Teachers can use varied approaches to support students in overcoming unfamiliarity with self-evaluation, lack of confidence in describing learning, writing difficulties, evaluation difficulties, discomfort discussing academic problems, cultural bias against self-evaluation, emotional…