Remixing the First-Year
Composition Classroom
Audience Lessons and Activities
Audience's Affect on Message
Break students into small groups (3-5). Ask students to write a letter to a specific audience (their grandmother, friends, professors, boss, a pop singer, stranger, etc.). Give each group the same topic and allow the group to compose the work in their groups. Come together as a class and have each group read their letter out loud. Discuss as a class what choices the group made based on their audience. After each group has presented, reinforce the importance of audience awareness on how the content is communicated.
Print Audience vs. Online Audience
Begin class by asking students to think about what audience means to them and have them write about the question for five minutes.
After they finish, bring up an online forum in which there is an author and an active audience via commenters. Open the notion that audience and authors work together to create meaning in a work. Facilitate a discussion in which students share what they wrote down as their definition of audience, if their ideas have changed, how/if medium changes what audience means, and why all these questions are important when considering their own compositions.
Who, What, and How in Audience
Give examples of several different types of media, may be both digital and print. Ask students these questions: Who is the audience, what do they expect, and how does that affect the outcome? This may be done as a facilitated discussion, CPA (Course Preparation Assignment), group work, etc. You may follow up the assignment or discussion by pushing students to think about the rhetorical context, specifically audience. An author needs to write with their audience in mind in order to best convey the meaning in their work.