Engaging Ideas. John C. Bean
dumps as described in chapter 2.
When helping students think about audience, therefore, instructors should encourage students to imagine their audience's initial stance toward their topic and to see their purpose as bringing about a change in that stance. It is this initial audience stance that creates for the writer an implied purpose or role. Here are some typical kinds of audiences and initial stances that instructors can use:
Naive or “learner” audience. Here the instructor specifies a naive audience who needs new information or a clear explanation of something. The student plays the role of expert relative to the assigned audience.
Explain the difference between velocity and acceleration to a student who missed last week's class discussions.
Your uncle thinks it is unfair and stupid that passengers sitting in the same section of an airplane probably paid different prices for their tickets. As an economics student, help your uncle see why all these different prices make economic sense and are not unfair.
Your boss needs information on competitors' marketing and pricing strategies for selected items that are not selling well in your stores. Do the research and write an informative report for the boss.
A nine‐year‐old diabetic child needs to understand the glycemic index of foods. As a pediatric nurse, prepare a short talk that will explain glycemic index in language the child will understand.
Undecided or puzzled audiences with skeptical tendencies. Here writer and reader of equal status confront a shared question or problem. The writer's role is to present, through critical thinking and analysis, a “best solution” to the problem while attending to counterviews. The audience will be interested in your solution but will raise skeptical questions.
What kind of bearings should our engineering team use in our design for a circumferentially mounted radiator fan? Write your proposal to the rest of your team. They are uncertain about the best approach but likely to raise objections to your solution.
Does Hamlet change in the last act? Write to classmates who are apt to be skeptical of your answer.
You are a research assistant to a state legislator who needs to decide whether to support a new sales tax on soda and candy as a means of raising state revenues and reducing consumption of sugar. Using the economic analysis tools we have learned in class, write a recommendation memo to your boss.
Resistant or hostile audiences. Here students must imagine an audience whose views of the subject are well formed and opposed to the writer's view. The writer's purpose is more clearly argumentative and persuasive.
The design team for the circumferentially mounted radiator fan has recommended air bearings, but you believe that this decision is a mistake. Write a memo to the team's project manager laying out your best case against air bearings.
Next week there will be a public hearing on whether to use taxpayer dollars to build a new sports arena for a professional basketball team in your city. Because you have been researching public financing of sports stadiums, you have been asked to present your position in a formal speech at the beginning of the hearing. Prepare your PowerPoint presentation for a five‐minute speech. Try to sway those most opposed to your position.
The value of helping students consider purpose and audience was revealed in Dan's national study of college writing assignments across disciplines, Assignments across the Curriculum (2014). Dan discovered that two‐thirds of the more than 2,000 writing assignments in his corpus were for purposes focused on low‐level thinking skills such as summarizing or describing information from textbooks or lectures. In the majority of the assignments in Dan's study, the instructors play the role of “examiner,” asking students to regurgitate information to prove understanding. The rhetorical situations for these assignments—the purpose and audience—were typically narrow and limited. Providing students with richer and more meaningful rhetorical situations than just “student to examiner,” and helping students think rhetorically about audience and purpose, can lead to deeper engagement with subject matter problems and to substantial improvements in their writing.
Two examples from John's research with colleagues across the disciplines illustrate the value of providing students with a more sophisticated and meaningful rhetorical situation than just the student's regurgitating information to the teacher as a judge. In a sophomore organic chemistry course, chemists Peter J. Alaimo and Joseph Langenhan decided to eliminate cookbook lab reports (which they saw as a pseudo‐genre, similar to the “research paper” that exists only in schools) in order to teach students how to write authentic professional papers in chemistry (Alaimo, Bean, Langenhan, and Nichols, 2009). To do so, they redesigned their labs to create authentic experimental problems that simulated discovery research. (Chemists interested in how Alaimo and Langenhan redesigned their labs to enable discovery research can read their article in Journal of Chemical Education listed in the references as Alaimo, Langenhan, and Suydam, 2014.)
Their scaffolded writing assignments for their redesigned labs specified a professional audience of practicing chemists who expected an authentic scientific paper rather than a “lab report,” which, they said, “encourage[s] students to think and behave like students rather than like professionals” (20):
Students' assumption that the audience for their reports is the instructor contributes to a novice style. In many cases this assumption is highly visible: Students [often referred] to the instructor directly in their writing (e.g., “Professor Alaimo said we should use 1 M NaOH rather than the 1.2 M NaOH that the lab manual recommended”). (20)
By contrast, addressing professional scientists “orients students to adopt the persona of expert insiders who are communicating with other expert insiders” (22). The authors demonstrate that writing to a practicing scientist about an authentic experiment led to more expert scientific thinking from their students as well as to substantial improvements in their writing.
Whereas this chemistry project focused on writing to professionals, a second project, led by finance professor David Carrithers, asked students to write to a lay audience—in this case a small business owner with no background in finance or quantitative analysis. Carrithers asked students to do a case analysis of a finance dilemma faced by the business owner. Students were then asked to write a memo to the owner recommending a course of action (Carrithers and Bean, 2008; Carrithers, Bean, and Ling, 2008). Carrithers specified a lay audience not only because finance professionals often work with nonexpert clients but also because addressing a lay audience forces students to avoid finance jargon—a constraint that requires an extra dimension of critical thinking. Here is his reasoning (Carrithers and Bean, 2008):
Students, we surmise, tend to find comfort in jargon. They can memorize the terms and thus feel that they sound like finance professionals without fully understanding the concepts they represent. However, it takes considerable control of the concepts to be able to explain them to a nonexpert audience. Besides revealing weak communication skills, use of jargon may thus be evidence of a fundamental inability to use financial concepts in unfamiliar settings. (19)
What Carrithers and his coauthors discovered in the initial phases of their finance project is that students were surprisingly resistant to writing to a lay audience. With few exceptions, despite the assignment's admonition to address an owner who had no insider knowledge of finance, students continued to imagine the teacher as reader. Students loaded their recommendations with finance jargon and even attached pages of Excel spreadsheets that would make sense only to a finance expert. The research team interviewed a representative sampling of students to discover why they didn't adapt their message to the assigned audience. Their reasons were instructive:
Students didn't think the instructor was serious about writing to a lay audience. They saw the owner‐as‐audience feature as simply a way to dress up an algorithmic problem with the trappings of a “story problem.” They assumed that the teacher was interested only in their algorithmic calculations and their correct