Students Need Audiences
This has been a big topic in our learning and teaching community here at Carolina Day over the past few weeks:
Students Need An Audience If We Expect Them To Learn How To Write: “Good writing requires attention to form and conventions, but it also requires an awareness of the audience at the other end. Whether you want to inform, inspire, or amuse, writing is about communicating. Yet we fail to impart this essential concept in school. Too much of the written work in our English classrooms (and history, science, and even math classrooms, for that matter) exists in a bubble that doesn’t extend past the school’s walls. And we’re not just talking about the dreaded book report: even complex, thoughtful assignments are divorced from any notion of audience. They’re written for the eyes of the teacher alone, making them feel inauthentic and irrelevant to students.”
The changing (evolving?) roles of essays, blogging, editing, reviewing and organization of thoughts is a conversation that all schools need to engage in this year.
So many questions arise.
I accept that there are many examples of writing, and kinds of writing, which do require an awareness of audience in order to be “good” in the sense of being “effective”. But I take exception to the absolute requirement for the author to intend to affect an audience for any piece of writing to be “good”.
Do you mean to say that writing cannot be “good”, according to your definition, unless there is an actual audience in existence whose acceptance or rejection of the work will determine its worth, or can the audience be imaginary, existing only in the mind of the writer? Can it be an audience of one?
Writing is an art, you must agree with that, so can we not apply the principles of aesthetics in this discussion? Is what you are suggesting similar to asking an artist to paint a picture so that it will “go” with the couch in your living room? The only artist who will undertake this is one in need of money or one of your friends. You’ll get pleasant decoration, perhaps artful, but I suggest you will probably not get Art.
There are many examples in all the arts of delayed appreciation, sometimes after decades or even centuries, of writers. Does this or does this not contradict your requirement? They could not have had any awareness of the audience their work eventually touched.
I know I have heard authors claim to not have an audience in mind as they write, including, perhaps mostly, poets. But as B. Collins put it, “The name of the author is the first to go”. Let me get back to you.
Every artist has an audience in their head.
I think you’re mistaking “crowd” or “gathering” for “audience” (at least in my interpretation of those words).
An audience can be one person (be it the writer’s love, the writer’s mother or the writer herself) or 6 billion people. What I write here (and how this site is designed and curated) is mainly written with just myself as the audience in mind, actually. I unendingly tweak because I want to impress myself. I count myself as this site’s main audience.
What I’ve noticed with my 7th grade students is that recognizing themselves as an audience is a very abstract and quite difficult hurdle to leap, especially since they are still “becoming” who they are/will be (aren’t we all, I guess?). However, writing for an audience as a k-12 student, or even a university student, helps builds the types of fundamentals that translate into better mechanics, delivery, pace and artistry in my observations of youth over the last 7 years of teaching.
To tip my cards, my masters degree is technically called “Religion and Literature” by Yale and the main undercurrent of my studies had to do with authorial intent, reader response and the place of the artist/writer/poet in the midst of this commerce of ideas. It’s definitely a fascinating topic that I love.
Writing can be an art, just as painting can be. Writing can also be mechanistic and seemingly devoid of any human inspiration or breath of life, just as industrial painting etc can be. In many ways, the lines between these definitions of what is art and what is not art are purely subjective and based on assumptions that the reader or viewer or engager makes when reading or seeing.
I like to think that I’m helping to produce writers-as-artists even though my students are 12 and 13 based on the notion that act of production invites the act of creation. Whatever art is, it has to be close to the smile on a 12 year old when they know they’ve nailed jello to the tree.