Discusses the importance of identifying the audience and determining specific objectives when designing printed instructional materials that will communicate effectively and provides detailed guidelines for dealing with such design factors as content, writing style, typography, illustrations, and page organization. (MBR)

Reviews literature on efforts to personalize mass communication by disguising the size of intended audiences, targeting messages, and contriving intimacy in content. Argues that distinctions between interpersonal and mass communications have become blurred into what might be called "pseudo-community." Finds that technological development…

Develops a theoretic description and definition of, and explores a wholistic approach to, public relations. Provides process models to consider quantitative and qualitative aspects of public relations behavior and permit analysis within and across subsystems or between subsystems and environment. Offers a definition of public relations which…

Examines the use of evidence in arms negotiations. Demonstrates how evidence is systematically processed to match prior beliefs. Shows public debate to be an exercise not likely to contribute much to new arms settlements. (MS)

Indicates greater attention to televised news was related to subsequent increased fear, concern, and avoidance activity in the public's behavior. Finds no such effects for newspaper crime news attention, although greater concern was related to subsequent increased readership. (JD)

Asserts that current business communication theory and practice make new inroads into reader analysis difficult. Discusses four pedagogical problems in reader analysis, including confusion over critical terminology, and poor heuristics for assessing readers. Explores readers' perceptual sets as a way of more accurately modeling the dynamics of the…

Reviews and equates theories of reader-response and rhetorical theories on audience response (the pathos principle). Concludes that the fundamental synonymity between them represents a significant bridge between analysis of literary texts and the dynamics of formal and social discourse and provides a theoretical foundation for teaching reading and…

Discusses how new video media affect patterns of exposure to television and explores how these changing patterns of consumption may be related to larger issues of the medium's social impact. (JD)

Describes a technical writing assignment designed to teach (1) audience awareness, (2) strategies for analytical problem solving, (3) an understanding of the patterns of organization that make the information clear to the intended audience, and (4) a mastery of the editing skills needed to make writing correct and concise. (SRT)

Discusses simultaneous airing by three commercial networks and influence on viewers' attitudes of The Great American Values Test, a 30-minute informational program designed to affect viewers' values about environmental issues, racial equality, and sexual equality. The program's effectiveness at influencing behavior was proven by a field…

Describes the promotion and public relations campaign and sale of commercial time by the American Broadcasting Corporation for "The Day After," a movie depicting nuclear holocaust, and discusses Nielsen Company findings and a J. Walter Thompson USA audience analysis and reaction survey regarding the program and its advertisers. (MBR)

Describes a study in which nine-year-old children wrote persuasive letters to two individuals and then participated in an oral task designed to determine their competence in listener adapted communication. (FL)

In the summer of 2000, Education Development Center's Center for Children and Technology (CCT) was contracted to evaluate the LIVE @ THE EXPLORATORIUM: Origins project as part of the Exploratorium's three-year funding from the National Science Foundation. Evaluation planning and work began in August of 2000 and continued through December 2003.…

This paper explores a writing-classroom pedagogy that uses dramatic literature and racially reversed roles as a springboard for discussion of diversity issues. According to the paper, the belief is that providing students with a drama that features ethnically reversed casts, performed sequentially, would allow them to recognize how powerfully skin…

Description can make a piece of writing come alive. This lesson plan combines art and word play, emphasizing writing for an audience while drawing on multiple intelligences. Peer review and feedback reinforces the revision process as students create trading cards by drawing pictures of monsters and describing and categorizing them in detail.…