Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay

Audience and Purpose

For students in high school, writing is quite often associated simply with a grade or an assignment. When composing for an assignment, the audience is not considered much beyond the teacher, if it is even considered that far. Kelly Gallagher addresses this conflict in purpose as follows:

Writing well does not begin with teaching students how to write; it begins with teaching students why they should write. Students who are taught how to write without being taught the real-world purposes behind authentic writing are much more likely to end up seeing writing as nothing more than a school activity—nothing more than a series of obstacles to overcome in order to pass a state test or to get to graduation.¹

In the world outside of the classroom, people write when a situation demands writing—a letter to a state representative, a report for a job, a review for a product purchased online. Each of these authentic types of writing has its own specific audience and purpose inherent to the task at hand. But many of the writing tasks that students are asked to complete in school don’t ask them to consider authenticity in their audience or purpose. This doesn’t translate when students move from the classroom to the real world.

As Peter Elbow explains it, “Good students often write not to communicate but to impress.”² This is an important distinction that really does boil down to an understanding of authentic audience and purpose. If a student aims only to write for the teacher and for a grade, they are missing the point of writing and writing instruction. Elbow goes on to make the distinction clearer, “Teachers are not the real audience. You don’t write to teachers, you write for them.” Teachers are coaches who are there to help you improve your craft, but they are not the end goal of learning to write. That is where writing authentically comes in.

Students often don’t see the value in approaching each classroom writing assignment as an authentic piece of writing, a piece of writing in which they should consider a specific audience and purpose. But, in my own experience, students’ writing improves drastically when their work asks them to write for a specific reader, whether it is a fellow classmate, a politician, or some other imagined target. The same is true for purpose. If a student merely writes to fulfill the assignment, the work is likely to lack true depth or insight; if the student is really writing to achieve something larger, she is likely to put more thought behind the impact of her words.

The main focus of this unit is for students to grapple with the idea that audience and purpose, when considered together during the writing process, have an impact on the writing we produce. “There is no such thing as good-writing-in-general,” says Peter Elbow. “You must make it good for this purpose with this audience.”³ To try to get students to see this concept in a relevant way, I ask them to consider how they might tell the same story to a parent and to a friend. What do you leave out in one version that you might find essential in the other? What are you hoping to achieve when telling a story to a friend and what is your purpose in telling it to your parent? These distinctions in how we communicate given different situations is equally important in our writing.

On the other hand, William Zinsser emphasizes paying little attention to audience. “But on the larger issue of whether the reader likes you, or likes what you are saying or how you are saying it, or agrees with it, or feels an affinity for your sense of humor or your vision of life, don’t give him a moment’s worry. You are who you are, he is who he is, and either you’ll get along or you won’t.”⁴ Surely there is some truth to this rationale—we shouldn’t change who we are to impress others. But, for students who are learning to write, the idea that you should only be one way on paper and not give consideration to audience is unreasonable.

While there may be some argument about what makes writing good in general, there is obviously truth to the larger point of Elbow’s statement: in order for a piece of writing to be impactful, it must be written with a clear target. What is the intended outcome of your writing? It is not enough to just put your rambling thoughts down on the page, at least not if you plan on sharing it. What do you want the reader to do upon reading your words? You might want her to feel guilty for past actions or for tears to well up in his eyes. You might want your audience to change a habit or to reach out to their state representative. You might simply want to make someone laugh. Each of these purposes will affect the words you choose and how you will arrange those words on the page.

Purpose and audience are inexorably linked together in the writing process and in the writing it produces. Imagine you are stuck in traffic on the way to an important meeting. You might write a text to the person in charge to let them know you will be there five minutes late. The person you send the note to and the reason for sending it are connected by the situation. At the same time, the purpose of the note and the intended audience help determine how you should phrase your words. Your diction will be simple and to the point. Your tone will be respectful and apologetic. This is a simple example, but the same holds true when we think about composing longer pieces of writing as well. What we say and how we say it are often equally important.