"Engage in discussion about something that captured your attention over the past few weeks in the course. Relate it back to specific class discussions, readings, and your grading/teaching when possible."

I suppose that one concept that has continued to stick out to me in this class is the problem of addressing an audience and teaching students to do so in their writing. We began talking about “audience” by reading Ede and Lunsford and noting their most important questions: What does it mean to address an audience? How do we define audience? To what degree should teachers address/stress audience?

We mentioned in class on Friday that the notion of audience has fundamentally changed in the last ten years with growing globalization. In this regard, it is difficult for students to understand that a piece of writing can have a specific audience, as opposed to sending it into the “void.” I have to admit that I also struggle with the concept of audience, and I find that I relate to the students who cannot always grasp the significance of “audience.” My high school taught English through rhetorical analysis, and I have come to feel that this is the reason I never felt strong about English until college (where they taught English classes through literature). In college, I was rarely, if ever, told to pick out the author’s audience. We would dwell on audience so far as it meant to look at a work’s context—time period, political landscape, biographical information about the author and their relationship to the rest of the world, etc. However, audience was rarely the entire focus in our study of literature. Much more so, in literature, we focused on resurfacing themes in a piece. Literature became the study of a person’s mind and the ways that they chose to present it in writing.

For some reason, discussion of audience can sometimes seem unnatural to me, like going against the grain of what I feel the author was trying to do. Some authors don’t even know what they are doing as they write—they do not have an audience in mind, and their only concern in regards to audience is if their work will be understood by a reader. We discussed in class Mitchell and Taylor’s “General Model of Writing” and how it places far too much emphasis on the audience (even disregarding the author as a reader). With this model, writing becomes pandering to the masses rather than expression of the human mind. In class, we have discussed several times the idea of the author as the first reader. In addition, we talked about audience addressed vs. audience invoked. My main concern is that sometimes, the author is the only reader. Some authors do not set out to “inform” or to “persuade” (they may do so in the process of writing, but for many this is not a primary goal). Some authors just wish to toy with an idea. Some authors begin writing because they see a problem and wish to offer new perspectives on it, to provoke thought in anyone who will read their piece, including themselves (and yet, in our grading, if a student points out that the author’s audience could be anyone, we tell them they need to specify, specify, specify).

Specifically while grading, I have noticed that most students struggle to supply an answer to the concept of “audience.” After three assignments that each ask for the audience and purpose of the same three articles, most students still don’t get it. (Something is wrong when a class does an assignment three times and is still doing it wrong). I think that many students cannot see the higher purpose in picking out audience/purpose/rhetorical choices, because many times, starting that small in a work makes you feel like you are failing to see the greater significance of the work. Specifically within andragogy, I find it almost impossible to explain to an adult why it matters that they be able to pick out the rhetorical choices that Robert MacNeil, John Simon, and Douglas McGray make. When you sit down to learn about great literature and your teacher tells you to search for rhetorical choices in the work (and that’s all you’re allowed to write about), it is very easy to get frustrated with English. In teaching with such a strong emphasis on rhetorical choices, audience, and purpose, I find that Shaughnessy’s idea says it all:  the student “risks as little as possible on the page… producing written Anguish.” We have to allow for deviation in the formula, for other potential ways of seeing a piece to peek through. It’s so complicated, because I feel that it is necessary to be able to recognize rhetorical choices, as that contributes to one’s interpretation of major themes in the work. But for me, writing never “clicked” until I was allowed to discuss the themes that I perceived in the work, rather than being herded into a distinct formula for a certain type of paper. For this reason, I loved the model of GW’s program that Jessica presented on during Friday’s class. I hope that programs like this can become the basis for other composition programs, as they provide such a high degree of relevance for the students.