Describes the author's department goals with three main principles: to build departmental community, to harness rather than dissipate energy, and to address multiple audiences simultaneously. Discusses how she communicates to the college as a whole what the department does well and finds ways in which caring for the department's interests might…

Examines one exemplar discipline, mechanical engineering, to see how classroom discourse and practice construct professional identities for students (as future engineers) and their customers. Suggests that although students' conceptions of the customer provided glimpses of professional identity, design processes in these classrooms were ultimately…

Notes that student writers gain greater insight into the importance of audience by analyzing business documents. Discusses how business writing teachers can help students understand the rhetorical refinements of writing to an audience. Presents an assignment designed to lead writers systematically through an analysis of two advertisements. (SG)

Offers a self-critique of the authors' earlier work "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." Proposes an alternative to the agonistic approach to establishing the new at the expense of exposing the faults of the old. Aims to learn from the cultural, disciplinary, and institutional forces at…

Discusses Victor Page, one of the first people to make a living as a technical communicator. Focuses on his 33 automotive and aviation books, popular with the public and critics, which contained information on novel technology, profuse illustrations, and easy-to-access information. States that Page published quickly, had firsthand expertise, and…

Studies use of a restricted language, Simplified English (SE), to write procedural documents for specific audiences. Examines the effect of type (SE versus non-SE), passage (A versus B), and native language on the comprehensibility, identification of content location, and task completion of procedure documents for airplane maintenance. Suggests…

Considers the change in the media presentation of Islam in Turkey after the ascent of commercial television. Discusses the image of Islam and of Turkish politicians as presented in different contexts on TV--the "issuetization" of Islam for the consumption of the mainstream audience. (PA)

Surveys the field of audience studies, noting common concerns. Identifies models of the audience: audience as mass, audience as outcome, and audience as agent. Recommends exploiting the interdisciplinary potential, employing an enlightened empiricism, considering audiences as collectives as well as individuals, abandoning the active/passive…

Discusses how earlier in his career the author did nothing to make nonfiction an integral part of his curriculum, nothing to help students critically read it or, more important, use it to inform the nonfiction he was asking them to write. Discusses a series of writing assignments using nonfiction. (SG)

Three pieces of writing were collected from 36 adolescent girls in each of three years to test writing-development scales measuring idea development, language use, and audience awareness. The scales were easy to apply in the classroom and capable of assessing students of varied disabilities. (SK)

Claims that in contrast to the view that attention to genre stifles creativity, genre theory offers useful possibilities for fostering student insight into the nature of academic writing. Argues that knowledge of genre helps students see writing as a social construction. (NH)

Examines rhetorical relationships among the student, the writing center, and the classroom teacher. Proposes a model in which the writing center and teaching faculty share the middle ground, and proposes a broader audience for student writers: the post-graduation profession. (SR)

Audience analysis involves the process of gathering and interpreting information about the recipients of oral, written, or visual communication. Audience awareness involves the conceptions of the writer, speaker, or performer concerning the recipients of his or her communication. Regardless of whether the author is sharing an oral history,…

This article describes an exercise that involves providing students with a basic understanding and demonstration of audience adaptation and then asking them to practice and evaluate the skill. In this exercise the instructor begins by providing students with background on analyzing and adapting to audiences. Then the instructor collects several…

Genital human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is the most common sexually transmitted virus in the United States, causing genital warts, cervical cell abnormalities, and cervical cancer in women. To inform HPV education efforts, 35 focus groups were conducted with members of the general public, stratified by gender, race/ethnicity, and urban/rural…