Discusses the difficulties with anticipating reader needs and evaluating a text's effectiveness. Reviews current methods of evaluating audience needs such as peer review and audience testing. Describes a reader-focused assignment detailing the class preparation, peer review, reader testing, reader response, and student response to reader…

Describes how one teacher uses life writing (reading and writing about transformative life experiences) in her basic writing class to engage students and to help them understand the power and purpose of reaching out to a variety of audiences. Discusses grading life writing. (SR)

The problems of writer's block and writing apprehension have just started to be examined in conjunction with modern rhetorical theories and practices. One of the variables that can make students more vulnerable to writer's block and writing apprehension is the degree of freedom the student is granted in the writing assignments. Two such freedoms…

After several years in academic public relations, a professional writer returned to teaching composition. After her first attendance at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, she experienced a turning point in her view of "the essay." Following the conference, she changed her assignments from…

Describes a set of writing assignments in a high school English class in which students research controversial, complex issues and then write letters to government officials or persuasive essays for other students, thus learning about persuasive writing, and civic action, and becoming more exacting in their language and more precise in their…

Gives seven responses from practicing English teachers concerning ways that they have implemented the writing of various kinds of letters by students into the English curriculum. Demonstrates the efficacy and success of such methods. (HB)

Describes an assignment in writing documentation that turns the classroom into a laboratory for usability testing, giving students a clear sense of the reader responding to their text. (SR)

A search of women's magazines yields countless missives on the virtues of female vigilance not only in protecting personal health but also in protecting spouse and family health. Indeed, the face and content of women's magazines has changed remarkably little from their 18th- and 19th-century predecessors, which circumscribed the ideology of…

A study examined how student-writers accommodated a real audience--that is how they adapted their writing to communicate clearly and forcefully with an audience other than the teacher. Subjects, 18 students in a pre-composition, remedial English course at Indiana University East, were asked to revise the formal drafts into a…

Given the affective dimension of writing in the workplace, assignments based on casebook scenarios have definite advantages in a technical or professional writing course. An English professor surveyed faculty in the Schools of Business and Education at Rider College prior to revising a course in technical writing. A majority of faculty, when asked…

Through three semesters of teaching the nonfiction essay, an instructor has come to terms with the fact that she has yet to attempt the type of personal essay that she asks her students to write, essays in which personal experiences with death are shared. However, a reminiscence on death through a recounting of her reactions to and understanding…

In a Purdue University English 101 class, students were told to identify an audience outside the classroom for each paper they wrote. The central challenge to composition teachers is preserving elements valued in teaching academic writing in the context of ill-defined problems to be addressed outside the classroom. Most useful for instructors…

Offering a fresh perspective on making writing meaningful in every classroom, this guide seeks to help the teacher and the parent encourage the student writer as a thinker, not merely as a producer of a paragraph. The guide offers guidance as well as many practical activities that will help students to: organize the mind; play with ideas; find…

Presents a one-class-period writing exercise (including handout) which uses a short excerpt from a 1948 book called "Making Housekeeping Easy" to teach the linking of claims to evidence as well as academic citation practices. (SR)

The letter format, whether on paper or on computers, fosters student collaboration and a virtual community. Letters have real audiences, even when those audiences are fictional, as in epistolary novels and imaginative writing assignments. Most adult, non-traditional students (such as those at Tidewater Community College in Virginia) know that…