ENGL 505A

Booth reiterates a statement made by Jacques Barzun when he says "to bore the teacher is a worse form of failure than to anger him" (142). One of my greatest goals as a teacher is to help my students -- middle school or university -- understand that their audience is not just me, and that writing for a grade is basically the equivalent of "boring the teacher" by ignoring an implied, broader audience. When "the notion of a job to be done for a particular audience is left out" (140), my students' papers read like a dry regurgitation of thoughts meant to move me -- and only me -- into giving the student an A.

It's interesting how quickly the notion of an audience can leave the mind of a student when he/she is writing a paper, especially considering how audience/purpose-driven writing is in our everyday lives. We write emails to colleagues with particular goals in mind, noting to ourselves as we are writing that we are writing to a fellow teacher, who has his/her own agendas in the classroom, or to a fellow English geek, who expects you to have awesome grammar, or to a boss, who expects us to sound professional and put together. Yet students have a tendency to come at a paper with a completely purposeless approach -- minus, of course, the contrived goal of "getting a good grade" -- and somehow we/they expect this purpose to drive us/them towards a revolutionary (or, as my 106ers say, "deep") insight about the world around them.

I like to think I have instilled in my students an awareness of a broader audience, since we have examined already how our various audiences might affect their first papers, yet I still can't help but feel that their writing will still have a relatively mundane purpose -- "get a good grade" -- combined with that boring audience -- me. I think that peer reviews will help dilute this; as Booth says, "one effective way to combat the pedantic stance is to arrange for weekly confrontations of groups of students over their own papers," but even this is still an artificially developed audience and setting.

When it comes right down to it, we are teachers, and we have to grade their papers, and ultimately, they ARE writing their papers for us, not the artificially contrived audiences they are encouraged to imagine as they piece their papers together. They write their papers in something of an academic "vacuum," though perhaps not as extreme as the vacuum perpetuated by standardized testing (141). We can attempt -- and succeed -- in teaching our students to "care about and practice the true arts of persuasion" (144), but the ultimate assessment of our success as teachers of rhetoric comes not in our class or in their papers, but later in their lives, when their purposes and audiences are less pedantic and more real.