Audience
Why It Matters
Writing assignments are written “for someone,” which means that students should know
- who that audience is or might be,
- why writing for that audience is important or useful, and
- what it means to write effectively for that audience.
More on "Audience"
As students transition to college-level writing, a lot of the writing they’ve previously done in school has been for a particular teacher they know well or for groups of anonymous readers evaluating standardized tests and applications. Neither of those situations is an ideal environment for stepping back and thinking about the complex ways in which writers might choose a certain genre or style or evidence based on the person or group of people they’re writing for.
In departmental courses, these choices might end up just being a function of disciplinary conventions, and over time students will ideally become more and more comfortable working within the conventional frameworks of their concentration (while also, ideally, being critically aware of the framework as a convention). All of which is to say that in departmental courses the question of audience, just like the complementary questions of genre or style, can fade into the woodwork over time.
This isn’t the case in Gen Ed, and not just because of the diverse disciplinary make-ups of teachers and students in any given course. In Gen Ed, questions about audience raise themselves because Gen Ed courses are directed at specific questions, themes, and solutions that lie beyond the university. What kind(s) of audience(s) are students writing for? For what purpose? What does it mean to listen to and communicate with (or on behalf of) that audience in ways that are intellectually productive and ethically responsible (and not in that order)? Questions like these are a vital part of helping students be intentional about the subject position they’re taking up as writers in any Gen Ed course, and they'll need the chance to practice writing for different kinds of audiences before heading into the later, more "product-oriented" phases of an assignment.
What It Looks Like
In the tabs below you'll find annotated examples of “audience” in assignment prompts, drawn from recent Gen Ed courses across a range of Gen Ed categories.
3D Museum Virtual Curation Assignment
Goal: The purpose of this assignment is for you to create a virtual museum gallery according to a theme or topic of your choice, from choosing the artifacts to be displayed, to the audience and setting of the exhibit, to the arrangement and aesthetics of the artifacts within this space. [1]
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Introduction to the Exhibit (3–5 pages): Please include an introduction explaining your exhibit to visitors and to potential museums that might want to display it. You should highlight the intended audience of the exhibit and explain why you made specific decisions on where and how to arrange and display your artifacts in your virtual space. [2]
__________
[1] Students are tasked with choosing the audience for their gallery exhibit, and that choice is framed as a function of other elements, such as evidence and style.
[2] Here students are asked to reflect and go meta on audience: How does one explain to museums how and why an exhibit is aimed at certain audiences? How does an exhibit explain to visitors how and why the exhibit is curated the way it is?
Adapted from Gen Ed 1099: Pyramid Schemes: What Can Ancient Egyptian Civilization Teach Us?
Professor Peter der Manuelian
Letter of Condolence
Please write a letter of condolence to a mother elephant who has lost her calf (250–350 words). Assume that this is a wild elephant, not an elephant in a zoo, and that (obviously!) she understands English. You, the writer, are presumably an elephant, too. [1]
This is partly an exercise in empathy. In planning your letter, try to get inside the emotional world of an elephant. [2] The readings for Class 5 by Barbara King and Frans de Waal are a start. You may also find it helpful to watch videos on YouTube that illustrate the behavior of elephants in the wild. Here are a few to start you off: [3]
[links to videos]
__________
[1] This assignment doesn’t just have an audience—it’s about audience. Here the prompt names who the audience is, while also clarifying some of the parameters that might otherwise distract from the goals of the assignment.
[2] In addition to being given an audience, students are given a sense of how this audience fits the overall purpose of the assignment.
[3] The prompt points to resources that will help students better imagine the perspective of the audience they’re writing for.
Adapted from Gen Ed 1131: Loss
Professor Kathleen Coleman
DATE: April 9, 2020
TO: GENED1008 Class Members [1]
FROM: Prof. M. Cammett
RE: Policy Memorandum Assignment
ASSIGNMENT
You and your colleagues are analysts in the U.S. State Department or the Foreign Ministry of another country tasked with writing a policy memorandum for the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs or an analogous Foreign Ministry official who will use your memo to prepare for a meeting with the Secretary of State or Foreign Minister. [2] The Secretary/Minister has called a meeting with top advisors to strategize [3] about the country’s position on Syria’s future political structure. One faction of advisors supports the dissolution of Syria into separate, sovereign states in which the Kurdish, Sunni, and Alawi communities govern themselves. Another faction opposes this and, instead, advocates for some kind of power-sharing arrangement, which would consist of either a consociational or integrative power-sharing system. A third faction favors a kind of mid-range solution that entails the implementation of decentralization reforms, which grant greater autonomy to provincial and local-level governments.
__________
[1] The heading segment of a memo establishes who the intended audience is; here, the prompt goes meta and models that convention of the genre before moving into the overview of the assignment.
[2] For this policy memo assignment, students are given clear guidance about a) the subject position they're writing from, b) the audience they're writing for, and c) how that audience will use what they're writing.
[3] Here students start to get more information about the stakes of the memo and who the stakeholders are. The prompt forces writers to consider the layers of audiences involved, namely the often complex and competing identities of real-world audiences.
Adapted from Gen Ed 1008: Power and Identity in the Middle East | Spring 2020
Professor Melani Cammett
More annotated examples coming soon
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