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 use of finance jargon.
They didn't think they would sound professional unless they used jargon; they felt they would be dumbing down their knowledge if they took the lay audience requirement seriously. They even thought the business owner would want them to use jargon.
They didn't realize the importance of walking in the shoes of business owners who needed bottom‐line advice and didn't need to know the technical calculations that yielded the advice. Until prompted by the interview questions, they didn't realize that the owner—unlike the instructor—would be confused by the finance jargon and Excel spreadsheets. They also didn't realize that they often buried (or didn't supply at all) the actual advice and supporting information that the owner needed.
They didn't see any transference between a previous course in business writing and the case study assignment in the finance course. The previous writing course stressed analysis of audience and purpose as the first step in producing a memo. This instruction didn't transfer to the finance course, apparently because students regarded the curriculum as a sequence of isolated courses with little connection to each other.
These findings support the frequently encountered observation that students write to the teacher even when they have been assigned a “real world” audience. As Anne Beaufort (2007) puts it in her own study of students' gradual acquisition of rhetorical knowledge, “School takes precedence; it is more immediate, so the more distant target audience cannot be fully imagined” (132). However, Beaufort shows how students make progress, sometimes quickly, when teachers stress the importance of imagining the needs of the reader. Our own research supports Beaufort's conclusion.
Helping students think about purpose, audience, and genre teaches them rhetorical concepts that have great explanatory power. What follows in table 3.1 are examples of the kinds of questions that instructors can encourage students to pose about any disciplinary writing assignment.
TABLE 3.1 Sample Questions to Spur Rhetorical Thinking
| Question to Ask | Purpose or Value of This Question |
|---|---|
|
What is my
|
