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All Writing Has a Purpose
• Reasons we write
• To explore thoughts and emotions
• To express ourselves
• To record words and events
• To persuade an audience
• Identify your purpose
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All Writing Has a Purpose
• Think about your purpose
• What do you want your audience to do,
think, or feel?
• What does this writing task call on you to
do?
• What is the best way to achieve your
purpose?
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Audience
• The audience influences and drives
everything you write
• Your audience must interpret what you write
according to their expectations and
experiences, not yours
• In academic writing, the audience will be
professors
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Audience
• Identify your audience
• Known: people with whom you are familiar
or have expectations known to you
• You can be your own audience (notes, etc.)
• Multiple: may have several levels of
readers such as supervisors who pass
your messages on to their bosses
• Unknown: can be the most difficult to
address because you don’t know the
audience’s expectations or experiences
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Thinking About Audience
Audience
Whom do you want to
reach?
What is your audience’s
background?
What are their interests?
Is there any demographic
information you should
know?
What political
circumstances affect
their reading?
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Thinking About Audience
Audience
What does your
audience already
know?
What is your
relationship with your
audience?
What does your audience
need and expect from you?
What kind of response do
you want?
How can you best
appeal to your
audience?
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Genre
• Genre: the kind of writing such as letters,
profiles, reports, position papers, poems,
blog posts, instructions, and so forth
• Genres help us write by establishing features
for conveying certain content
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Genre
• Think about your genre
• What is your genre, and how does it affect
what content you include?
• Does it call for a specific strategy?
• Does it require certain organization?
• Does it affect your tone?
• Does it require formal or informal language?
• Do you have a choice of medium?
• Does it have any design requirements?
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Stance
• Stance is your attitude toward your topic
• Identify your stance
• Objective, critical, curious, opinionated,
passionate, indifferent
• Stance is affected by genre
• Stance is communicated through tone
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Thinking about Stance
Stance
What is your
stance, and
how does it
relate to your
purpose?
How should
stance be
reflected in
your tone?
How is
stance likely
to be
received by
your
audience?
Should you
openly
reveal your
stance?
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Media
• Medium is a go-between, or a way for information to
be conveyed from one person to another
• “Media” is the plural form of “medium”
• We communicate through many media
• Sometimes a phone call is appropriate, sometimes
an email is sufficient, sometimes a formal letter is
necessary
• Each medium has unique characteristics that
influence what and how we communicate
• Multimedia is combined media
• Multimodal is combined multimedia formats
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Think about Media
Media
How does
medium affect
what
elements you
include?
What medium
are you using
(print,
spoken, etc.)?
How does
medium affect
strategies and
organization?
How does
medium affect
your
language?
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Design
• Think about design
• What is the appropriate look for your
rhetorical situation?
• What elements need to be designed?
• What font(s) are appropriate to your
audience, purpose, genre, and medium?
• Are you including any visuals?
• Should you include headings?
Hinweis der Redaktion
Mention to students that identifying purpose is critical to clear communication. Purposes include entertainment, persuasion, demonstration, or gaining knowledge.
The audience does not need to know everything you know, only what you want them to know at any given moment.
Give students this scenario: make believe you are the human resources director for a large corporation. Your task is to distribute a formal letter to all employees informing them that their health-care benefits have been substantially reduced. Remind students that they are writing to people who may have an eighth-grade education or a masters’ degree, so they must be conscious of complexity of wording and technical jargon. The audience is likely not going to be happy about this news, so the letter must be worded to soften the blow as much as possible. Have students get into groups and think of potential problems that might arise when writing such a letter.
Ask students to come up with different scenarios and then decide which genre would be best suited for each scenario. Then ask students how tone and stance would be affected by the genres chosen.
Explain to students that stance is sometimes called argumentation. Argumentation does not mean that a writer and a reader will go to fisticuffs; it means the writer must prove what he/she is saying. This is important in academic writing because students need to add credibility to their writing by citing experts in their fields.
All these aspects are important, but audience is probably the most important because without it, writing is in vain.
Give students an assignment in which they take a block of information and then decide which medium or combination of media would be best to communicate the information.
For the assignment in the previous slide, have students design their message, and then justify why they designed
it that way.
