Purpose

Students will learn the importance of audience as part of their rhetorical awareness.

Essential Question

Why is it critical to take into account one’s audience when writing?

Procedure

1. Introduction to rhetorical awareness of one’s audience: class activity
1. Select students receive a card with an “audience” written on it. Options include (but are not limited to) the follow:
1. Peer
2. Minister
3. Principal
4. President of the country
5. Cousin’s friend
6. Teacher (when student is still an adolescent)
7. Former teacher (when student is an adult)
2. Students with cards role play with teacher, pretending to greet the teacher in a way appropriate to the audience listed on the card.
3. Students try to guess the relationship of the selected student to the teacher (in the role play)
4. Discuss as class
2. Audience (presentation: class notes)
1. Affects word choice
2. Affects tone
3. Affects voice
4. Affects conventions
3. “Three of Me” (Individual practice)
1. Students will write three different 200-word descriptions of themselves:
1. to introduce self to rest of the class;
2. for a school yearbook;
3. for a social networking page (MySpace/Facebook/Tumblr/Twitter)
2. In pairs, students discuss differences in
1. word choice
2. conventions
3. voice
3. Debrief as class

Source

“Three of Me” is derived from an activity in Teaching Writing that Matters: Tools and Projects that Motivate Adolescent Writers, by Chris Gallagher and Amy Lee.