They didn't realize the importance of walking in the shoes of business owners who needed bottom‐line advice and didn't need to know the technical calculations that yielded the advice. Until prompted by the interview questions, they didn't realize that the owner—unlike the instructor—would be confused by the finance jargon and Excel spreadsheets. They also didn't realize that they often buried (or didn't supply at all) the actual advice and supporting information that the owner needed.
They didn't see any transference between a previous course in business writing and the case study assignment in the finance course. The previous writing course stressed analysis of audience and purpose as the first step in producing a memo. This instruction didn't transfer to the finance course, apparently because students regarded the curriculum as a sequence of isolated courses with little connection to each other.
These findings support the frequently encountered observation that students write to the teacher even when they have been assigned a “real world” audience. As Anne Beaufort (2007) puts it in her own study of students' gradual acquisition of rhetorical knowledge, “School takes precedence; it is more immediate, so the more distant target audience cannot be fully imagined” (132). However, Beaufort shows how students make progress, sometimes quickly, when teachers stress the importance of imagining the needs of the reader. Our own research supports Beaufort's conclusion.
Helping students think about purpose, audience, and genre teaches them rhetorical concepts that have great explanatory power. What follows in table 3.1 are examples of the kinds of questions that instructors can encourage students to pose about any disciplinary writing assignment.
TABLE 3.1 Sample Questions to Spur Rhetorical Thinking
| Question to Ask | Purpose or Value of This Question |
|---|---|
| What is my level of expertise relative to my assigned audience? (Note: a student may be a novice relative to the instructor but an expert relative to someone else.) | Helps writer determine an appropriate level of vocabulary and syntax as well as amount of background and development needed. |
| How do I want to change my readers' view of my topic? | Helps writer establish a contestable thesis in conversation with alternative views. |
| How much does my audience already know about the problem/issue I am addressing? How much do they care about it? | Helps writer compose an effective introduction. The less an audience already knows about the writer's subject, the more the writer must provide background and context. To motivate the audience to care, the writer needs to make the problem vivid and to show why addressing the problem matters. |
| What's the “news” in my paper? What constitutes old information and new information for my audience? | Helps writer connect new information to old information. Readers need to know the “news” quickly—usually in the title or subject line and certainly early in the introduction. But the news makes sense only when linked to the reader's previous knowledge and interests (old information). |
| How resistant is my audience to my thesis? | Helps the writer accommodate resistant readers. Resistant audiences need assurance that the writer has thought about and respects alternative views; they'll expect the writer to anticipate possible objections and respond to them. |
| How busy is my audience? | Helps writer think about reader's environment. Busy audiences often prefer concise documents with easy‐to‐scan structures and meanings up front. |
Helping Students Think about Genre
In addition to purpose and audience, another important rhetorical concept is genre. The term genre refers to recurring types of writing identifiable by distinctive features of structure, style, document design, approach to subject matter, or other markers. Genres usually arise from recurring cultural occasions or rhetorical situations with their own recognizable patterns. Certain cultural contexts or situations might call a writer to, say, compose a syllabus, a tweet, a complaint letter, or a scholarly article (all examples of genres) or to purchase a birthday card or a bumper sticker (genres that let you convey a message without much effort of your own). Any given genre has prototypical members that exemplify the most common features of the genre as well as innovative members that push the limits of the genre, playing creatively with its features. Some genres, such as the APA research report, are governed by strictly prescribed rules (the Publication Manual of the APA) set forth by the discourse community. Other genres are more diffuse or open to a wide range of structures and style (popular magazine articles, blogs, the personal essay). Exhibit 3.1 shows some typical examples of genres.
EXHIBIT 3.1 Examples of Genres
| Personal Writing | Academic Writing | Popular Culture | Public Affairs/Civic Writing | Professional/ Workplace Writing |
| Letter Diary/journal Reflection Autobiographical essay (literary nonfiction) Blog Text message Personal essay Facebook page | Scholarly article Book/chapter Abstract Conference paper | Magazine article Advertisement Hip‐hop lyrics Bumper sticker Graffiti Fan website Comic book Newspaper article Greeting card | Letter to the editor Op‐ed piece Tweet Advocacy website White paper Political blog Advocacy poster Magazine article on civic issue Policy brief Documentary film | Cover letter Résumé Business memo Legal brief Brochure Technical manual Proposal Marketing plan Management report |
The concept of genre is often confusing to students. One way John tries to explain genre is to create an analogy between genres and dress codes. Just as some social occasions create writing genres, other social occasions create clothing genres. John places on the board some typical social occasions such as “wedding,” “job interview,” “high school prom,” “workday casual,” or “Halloween party” and invites discussion of appropriate kinds of dress. John wants students to see that social occasions create clothing expectations that operate as genres—invitations to dress in a certain way along with corresponding limits or constraints. One can express individuality at a job interview by choosing a particular style and quality of necktie or handbag but not by choosing a favorite sweatshirt or pair of flip‐flops. Similarly, one can express individuality in an APA research report by asking a particularly shrewd research question or developing an elegant methodology, but not by creating a fun cover page or organizing the report as a personal narrative.
To operate successfully in a written genre, students need to learn the genre's expectations, possibilities, limits, and constraints. Many of the questions that concern novice writers (such as Can we use “I” in our papers? or Do I need a thesis statement in the introduction?) are functions of the assigned genre rather than of the teacher's whims. But genres are more than a set of guidelines for formatting and style. According to some theorists, they are forms of “social action” (Miller, 1984)—that is, they help produce the ways that certain communities think and act (Bawarshi, 2003; Bazerman, 1987, 1988; Beaufort, 2007;