Rhetorical Stance
The exercise Booth mentions represents a good way to make students aware of the importance of writing for the intended audience and of the idea of writing what he calls "purposeful human communication" (141). I have employed variation of this exercise. I have asked my students to describe a phenomenon or a place for at least three different types of audience: interested in science, music, computer, sports, and/or a field of particular interest to them. I have also asked them to express an emotion caused by a specific event to an academic audience and then to express the same emotion to their friends. I asked a volunteer to read his/her two texts and we commented about word choice-audience-context. The balance betwen the pedant's and the advertiser's stance is, indeed, important; nonetheless, as Booth points out, through his relating the dinner conversation, achieving this balance is NOT always effective. We DO write for an audience and kowing/anticipating our audience's reactions becomes more important sometimes than achieving the balance Booth mentions. This places is in a quandary. What do we teach our students? That they need to achieve the balance, or that they need to meet their audience's expectations/needs/wants? Do you have any suggestions?
Comments
Just questions
I did something like this before when I was teaching academic writing in China (it might even be included in the writing activities I posted) with mixed results. My students seemed to get part of it -- that is, different audiences will be interested in different aspects of a given phenomenon -- but they had a hard time understanding that these changes need to go beyond the sentence level. For example, in describing the new iPod to someone interested in music they might write: "You can download all of your favorite songs from the Internet." Whereas, when their audience was interested in computers, they would write: "You can download video games and access the Internet," rather than focusing on memory, compatibility, or other specs (or if they did, they would include it in both -- a sort of prime-time TV approach to advertising). This is an overly simplified example, but often the changes were of this nature: just add, subtract, or rearrange a few words, but keep everything else essentially the same.
Perhaps this was a bigger a problem for these students because they had limited proficiency in English, but I'd be interested in hearing more about what happened in your class. Did they lean too far to one side? What do you think compelled them to take this stance? Was a balance ever achieved?