Describes a technical writing assignment in which students write two different papers on the same topic--one directed toward a lay or executive audience, and the other toward an operator or technician audience. (SR)

Maintains that writing teachers, and thus also their students, have become obsessed with revision as an end in itself. Suggests that the writer-computer relationship is displacing the writer-audience relationship in the rhetorical situation and may often function to isolate writers. (SR)

Offers a case study of a child who used school writing activities to perform rather than simply to communicate. Finds that, although the child's language resources contributed greatly to his success with written language, they did not always fit comfortably into the writing workshop used in his classroom. (PRA)

Explains how a teacher used tape--pieces hanging from her hair, her desk, and student desks--to help students remember some of the principles of writing represented in the acronym TAPE: topic, audience, purpose, and elaboration. (TB)

Argues that the relationship between writer and reader (or audience) must be reimagined in writing theory so as to recognize that neither is knowable or static. Suggests that Thomas Kent's theory of paralogic hermeneutics could help teachers advance a theory of audience that would act as a bridge between actual writing and theories of language.…

Details writing problems technical students encounter when they fail to distinguish between model and example and between different kinds of models. Analyzes these problems with reference to inappropriate material in texts. Defines several writing models, and shows how understanding these models gives writers rhetorical flexibility while producing…

Argues that, before there can be effective criticism of advertising, people must admit that all respond to it in ways that are both pleasing and skeptical, amused and doubting, open and resisting. Discusses listening to the "other reader" and cultural criticism in the composition class. (PRA)

Discusses ways to use the author awareness approach (a sense of who wrote the story, how, and why) to teach writing. Notes that this approach improves students' reading as well as writing. (SR)

Suggests that technical writing teachers pay closer attention to how students constitute an active and demanding audience. Profiles three different, yet representative, types of technical writing students: institute of technology students, industry students, and liberal arts students. (MG)

Describes a project in a reading class in which students wrote to communicate with a real audience and in so doing interested themselves and others in reading and writing. Outlines the project's five steps of prewriting, prewriting with partners, writing, revising, and proofreading. Notes the students' overwhelming positive response to the…

Argues for the teaching of "visible features of written texts," or document design, in composition classes. Concludes that educators must teach students how to see their own texts through the eyes of the readers they hope to attract, converse with, and persuade. (SC)

Offers a self-critique of the authors' earlier work "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." Proposes an alternative to the agonistic approach to establishing the new at the expense of exposing the faults of the old. Aims to learn from the cultural, disciplinary, and institutional forces at…

Claims that in contrast to the view that attention to genre stifles creativity, genre theory offers useful possibilities for fostering student insight into the nature of academic writing. Argues that knowledge of genre helps students see writing as a social construction. (NH)

In technical writing classes, audience is one of the most important concepts. Technical writing is typically written to a specific audience for a specific purpose. In addition, as audiences change, so must the way a document is written. An audience's lack of knowledge in a technical area, for example, would require more background information or…

A writing exchange project at Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College in Vermont, funded by Apple Education Foundation and McDonnell Douglas, examined what happened when high school students use word processors and a modem to write to distant audiences. In the first exchange, students interviewed each other in pairs and wrote short…