The effects of audience on the writing of college freshmen

This research attempted to assess the effects of audience on the voice and persuasive processes of college freshmen writers, and to record the changes in students' concepts of their voice and powers of persuasion and the effects of audience specification on students' motivation to write well and perform well in the writing classroom. This study used quantitative procedures, a pretest-post-test design, and qualitative procedures, open-ended questionnaires and the instruct or's daily journal of activities and comments, to determine the effects of audience specification (three treatments: class audience, real audience, and imaginary audience) on the writing and attitudes of three classes of college freshmen writers (64 students) at a small university in Tennessee.

The quantitative data indicated that all the groups improved in their voice and persuasive skills, but that the group whose audience was the class improved most. The qualitative data indicated that audience specification affected the students' ideas of themselves as writers, which in turn determined their motivation. The students in the class-audience group were motivated to write clearly on topics in which their peers would have interest and were freed to express their opinions openly. The students in the real audience group were motivated to turn out a product that would accomplish a real purpose, and they were challenged to get involved in the outside world. The students in the imaginary-audience group were not uniformly motivated; some were able to imagine an audience while some became confused and others assumed the teacher was the audience.

This study suggests that a variety of specified audiences would work best in the writing classroom, beginning with the class as an audience to promote confidence, moving to a more challenging audience inside the academic setting, and then graduating to real audiences outside the academic setting. Above all, this study emphasizes the fact that all student writing, aside from personal journal writing, should have a definite audience; asking students to imagine an audience is not enough to promote audience awareness.