Audience Analysis

Question: Is audience analysis a simple matter for writers?

Answer/Quote: “At an afternoon meeting of a professional writing group for K-12 teachers in our local area, a group of teachers sat around a table sharing ideas and partial drafts of articles for publication. Responding to a call for manuscripts, they worked to develop drafts of articles that described promising slices of their classroom practice or examined problematic teaching situations they had encountered. The teachers around the table differed in terms of degrees held, years of experience in teaching, prior experience with writing, and familiarity with professional journals, yet they described some shared challenges in developing heir articles.

Quote: “They wondered aloud whether they had ‘enough’ evidence, referring to the anecdotes and artifacts from their classrooms that they were analyzing in the drafts. Some worried that they needed more citations or even statistics from some large-scale study in order to make the observations they wished to make. They talked about the appropriate register for addressing the readers of a journal, wondering if it should be like speaking to colleagues in a faculty meeting or writing to a professor in a graduate course. They sometimes wondered whether they might ‘get in trouble’ with their building and district administrators if they expressed criticisms of curricula in place in their school or, more subtly, if they described teaching approaches that differed from the district curriculum guide.” Pp. 390-391.

Comment: Pretty good example of how audience analysis can be very complex. RayS.

Title: “Audience and Authority in the Professional Writing of Teacher-Authors.” AE Whitney, C Dawson, K Anderson, SK, EO Rios, N Olcese, and M Ridgeman. Research in the Teaching of English (May 2012), 390-419.

Audience and Writing

Question: When should college students pay attention to audience for their writing?

Answer/Quote: “Results indicated that attending to audience can be effective for improving the overall quality of students’ writing. Results suggested, however, that attending to audience is less effective as a drafting strategy than it is as a revising strategy.” P. 75.

Quoting James Moffett: “If anybody is going to do anything about the teaching of writing, the first priority is going to have to be the rekindling of the sense of audience. Until that’s done, nothing else is going to happen.” P. 75.

Quote: “The results of the present study suggest that much of our audience awareness pedagogy may not give students the best advice as to when to attend to audience.” P. 83.

Comment: This study suggests that the best time to consider audience is in the revision stage of writing. Since a number of studies seem to suggest the same time for considering audience, during revision, I would suggest it to my students. RayS.

Title: “The Effects of Audience Awareness on Drafting and Revising.” DH Roen and RJ Willey. Research in the Teaching of English (February 1988), 75-88.

Writing in the Disciplines

Question: How do writers in specific disciplines adapt to the writing requirements of that discipline?

Answer: This is an initial study of the problem of adapting to the writing requirements of specific disciplines. The student in question was a PhD candidate in rhetoric. He was a teacher of writing, but he was so overwhelmed by the writing requirements of his discipline that he made fundamental mistakes in coherence and point of view (writing in the first person, for example).He also found that strictures were waived in certain types of writing. They were not the same for all types of writing in the field.

Comment: I bring up this article because helping students adjust to the unfamiliar writing requirements of disciplines is important to helping students recognize the realities of achieving successful writing in a new field. I look forward to more studies of adapting to the unfamiliar writing requirements of disciplines beyond English. This study also sheds light on the limitations of writing instruction in undergraduate English classes. RayS.

Title: “Conventions, Conversations, and the Writer: Case Study of a Student in a Rhetoric Ph.D. Program.” C Berkenkotter,  TN Huckin, and J Ackerman. Research in the Teaching of English (February 1988), 9-44.

Writing Assessment

Question: What are some of the problems with writing assessment?

Answer/Quote: “Another common complaint about large-scale assessments is that they do not provide students with enough time. Again, the effects of this on performance is an empirical issue, but is often framed rather simplistically. All current assessments are really evaluations of student performance given a particular set of constraints,

 

“Performance is judged relative to other students operating within the same constraints…. There simply are no absolute standards of comparison, so that the issue of more or less time leading to ‘better’ writing is somewhat misleading. What is important—and unclear—is whether such constraints systematically bias the results for or against one or another group of students. Do students from process-oriented classrooms, for example, do less well relative to their peers when asked to compose spontaneously than they would if given the same topic to think about a day in advance?

“Or do students from one or another minority culture perform better, relative to their peers, if everyone is given the opportunity to discuss a writing topic before beginning to write? Such differences, and the biases that they imply in current testing formats are certainly plausible, but they have received little systematic attention from language researchers.”

Comment: Some ideas to think about. RayS.

Title: “Musings… Writing Assessment,” Arthur N Applebee. Research in the Teaching of English (February 1988), 6-9.

Dialogue Joournals

Question: What are dialogue journals in writing instruction?

Answer/Quote: “One of the goals of dialogue journals—interactive written communication between a teacher and students—is the students learn to communicate effectively in writing.”

Quote: “Dialogue journal writing, written interaction between teachers and students gives students the opportunity to write about topics of their choice, to focus primarily on the meaning of what they write rather than on its form, and to write to an audience who is known and who responds to their ideas rather than evaluating what they have said or how they have said it.” P. 310.

Comment: The authors found that the teacher’s filling the dialogue with questions, in effect, shut the students down. RayS.

 Quote: “The findings of this study of written interaction—that the teacher’s writing was not dominated by questions but characterized by contributions…--suggest that the success of the dialogue journal interaction lies precisely in the teacher’s participation as an active partner in a meaningful, shared communication.” P330.

Title: “The Effect of Teacher Strategies on Students’ Interactive Writing: The Case of Dialogue Journals.” JK Peyton and M Seyoum. Research in the Teaching of English (October 1989), 310-334.

Audience

Question: When is the best time to consider audience information, before the first draft or before the final draft?

Answer: “Findings indicate that both groups of writers tended to defer audience considerations until the revision stage.”

Comment: However, some writers used the information both before the beginning draft and before the final draft. I think I would have students replicate the use of audience information  before the first draft and before the final draft and see which works best for them. In general, I think I would recommend use of the information in the revision stage of writing. Next question: how do good writers adapt their writing to the audience? RayS.

Title: “Audience and Information.” Bennett A. Raforth. Research in the Teaching of English (October 1989), 273-290.

Teaching Irony in Literature

Question: Which is more effective in teaching a literary skill, like irony, direct instruction or a method in which students develop their own methods of interpreting irony?

Answer: Both methods were statistically superior to no method at all. “(1) a direct method…which attempts to give students conscious control of the interpretive strategies experienced readers use to understand irony [or] (2) a tacit method, which seeks to have students develop their own strategies through extended practice with the genre.” P. 254.

Comment: Both methods worked. The key, of course, is to teach the skill, directly or indirectly, the latter being the “discovery” approach. The latter would probably take more time. But both worked. RayS.

Title: “Teaching the Interpretation of Irony in Poetry.” Michael W Smith. Research in the Teaching of English (October 1989), 254-272.