The effects on freshman writing of specifying audience and purpose in writing assignments.

Audience analysis is a debated issue in the field of rhetoric. Those who support the traditional view propose that students need to analyze their audience when writing and that teachers should give assignments which specify an audience and purpose for writing. Those who support the nontraditional view believe that teachers have overemphasized the role of audience analysis in composition and should instead concentrate on teaching students to write clearly and logically so any reader can understand the message. Although much has been written about the role of audience analysis in composition pedagogy, many rhetoricians still question its value.

To help answer these questions, I tested six sections of first-quarter freshman composition students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville using three types of assignments dealing with audience commonly found in freshman composition textbooks.

The essays were holistically scored, and the results showed that assignment B, which gave students an audience and purpose, produced a higher mean score (2.43) than assignment A (2.13), which gave only a topic, or assignment C (2.20), which asked students to choose their own audience and purpose.

Analysis of these results revealed that assignment B helps average college freshmen write better essays because it gives students a specific audience and purpose which helped decrease their habit of writing for the teacher. It also produced better writing because it made the transition from writing to the teacher as audience to writing for other audiences less cognitively difficult. Because of these results, a course design was developed using assignments like B to help students develop the cognitive abilities to choose their own audience and purpose for writing.