Reading from previous week:
"On Audience and Composition" Lisa Ede
Assignment:
Select a newspaper article from this week's campus paper. Write a two-page analysis of the article that you have selected. Summarize what you think the author's message is to the audience. Be sure to identify the intended audience and provide specific examples of how the author has communicated with this audience in mind. Give some examples of how the article could be changed to more effectively convey the intended message to the audience you have identified.
Learning Objectives:
Understand the important role audience that plays in the rhetorical situation.
The reading will give students an overview of how audience has historically been handled in the composition classroom and introduce varyious perspectives on the importance of audience in the composition process. The assignment will challenge the student to envision a specific audience, which is a task that the article indicates is difficult for many young writers.
I have done something similar to this, Heather, and have always gotten great results. I like for students to use the editorial/opinion section of the newspaper or an online news website to identify audience, speaker, and purpose. If they eventually write their own compositions with their opinions in it, they will be much better at recognizing successful arguments and the techniques (or rhetorical strategies) that more experienced writers use to achieve their purpose. I think it would be fun to add a twist too: what if we had students look at the "users comments" section of a website and have them analyze their arguments? Typically, I look at these at the end of news articles and think that 90% of the people who are wacky, but I will sometimes find well-reasoned points! Either way, they could identify fallacies and weak arguments as well as stronger ones.
ReplyDeleteGood assignment here and thanks for the idea!