JAC Volume 1, Issue 2

One evening, as I walked into my dining room to write this paper, I looked critically at my "desk." There were two coffee cups, an electric typewriter, books, and files labeled "technical writing," "business writing" "journalism," and "academic writing" all spread across my spacious, five-legged dining room table. I wonder today if it was this coincidence of subject and setting that prompted me to visualize advanced composition as a table with five legs.

Whatever the inspiration, the image was fortuitous. I had already come to the conclusion that every advanced composition course I taught had five elements: audience, purpose, voice, organization, and polish. "If we teachers," I thought, "can visualize advanced composition as a structure with five components we should be able to teach any upper level writing course, no matter what the specific content, with confidence."

The purpose of this article is to explain the five components essential to advanced composition and to illustrate their general applicability with examples from technical writing, business writing, journalism, and academic writing.

Audience

One component, or goal, of any advanced writing course is to teach writers to analyze their audiences and adapt their writing to those audiences. Sometimes—as when journalism students write news stories for the campus paper—the audiences is known, palpable, has eyes, skin, hair. More often, however, students must fictionalize their audience—pretend they know the manager to whom their progress report is addressed, know her well enough to convince her that progress has, indeed, been made. Whether the audience is real or fictionalized, however, students can learn to write for specific audiences if we teach them to make certain distinctions and ask certain questions.

Students must learn to distinguish between three separate operations: analyzing the audience, determining the effect they want to achieve with that audience, and taking the steps necessary to achieve that effect. We can easily teach our students to consider and analyze their audiences—I use an audience analysis chart for every assignment, and students fill it in quickly and accurately. I find it more difficult, however, to have students define the effect they want to achieve: Do they want their audience to understand, to feel, to act. And it is most difficult, as Linda Flower showed in College English, to teach students to adapt the organization and language of their communications for their audiences, to teach students to convert their writer-based prose to reader-based prose. Filling in an audience analysis chart, then, is only the first step of a complex cognitive operation which students of advanced writing must learn.

Sometimes, if the audience is known and fairly limited, and if the assignment is conventional, distinguishing between audience analysis, effect, and adaptation is easy. Consider, for example, the two memos written by Amanda Patterson to inform peers and superiors of a recommendation to serve dinner the first night of finals week.

Example 1:  Audience of Peers

Example 2: Audience of superiors

Findings

Recommendations

This is how Amanda assessed her audiences: 

Analysis:

Effect:

Adaptation:

These assessments were relatively easy for Amanda because she knew her primary audiences, what she wanted to achieve, and how to achieve it.

Sometimes, however, the process of audience analysis and adaptation is not so easy. Right now, I do not feel especially confident about my perception of you as an audience because I am not sure who reads the Journal of Advanced Composition. Here is my tentative assessment of you—as I sit at my dining room table in West Lafayette.

Analysis:

Effect:

Adaptation:

My problem, you see, differed from Amanda's problem because she knew her audiences and I had to fictionalize you. In both cases, however, being able to distinguish between audience analysis, effect, and adaptation led to a finished product consciously designed for real people. To help your students develop a cognitive operation which focuses on audience, you can have them answer these six questions:

*Who is my primary audience?

*What effect do I want to achieve with this audience?

*What use will this audience make of my writing?

*What features can I add, condense, or omit for this audience?

*How can I organize my writing to help my audience understand and use it?

*How can I format, revise, and edit my writing to help this audience?

Purpose

A second essential goal in any advanced writing class is to teach students to state their purpose. Whether you belong to the left phalanx of the writing camp, defending Peter Elbow's Writing Without Teachers ² against all attackers, or whether you stand to the right of center, raising your flag over Sheridan Baker's Practical Stylist ³ your generals share one strategy: They may call it finding if your "center of gravity" or honing "your argumentative edge," but they agree that students must be able to formulate a clear statement of purpose.

How to state a purpose clearly, however, often baffles a writer—whether she is a student in engineering or an executive at IBM. The best advice on writing purpose statements I have discovered comes from the systems analysis approach used by J.C. Mathes and Dwight Stevenson in their textbook, Designing Technical Reports ^.4 Mathes and Stevenson show how an organizational problem prompts an assignment, which prompts a staff member's technical tasks, which prompts his or her rhetorical tasks, which end in a report which circulates through the organization. This systematic analysis produces a three-step cognitive procedure for formulating purpose statements, which can be taught to students as a series of questions.

*What is the general context or problem to which this writing responds?

*What is the specific difficulty, question, or assignment?

*What is the rhetorical purpose? ( The purpose of this communication is to what?)

Answering these questions allows any writer to move into any communication—and effectively take his or her reader along. The following samples of opening paragraphs from technical writing, business writing, journalism, and academic writing illustrate the general applicablity of this procedure.

Example I:_Technical Writing

American President Lines Report

Example 2: Business Writing

Bell Telephone Company Memo

Example 3: Journalism

Journal & Courier, February 24, 1980, Page 1

Example 4: Academic Writing (English)

Each of these examples begins with the general or organizational context, moves into the specific or technical question, and ends with a statement of rhetorical purpose. If students can learn to ask the three key questions when they begin writing, they will have learned a second process which characterizes advanced writing: clear formulation of purpose statements.

Voice or Persona

The third goal in advanced writing is to teach students to adopt a voice or assume a persona appropriate to their audience and purpose. How can we teach students to control "voice"? In an article to appear in College Composition and Communication, I describe one way.⁵ I show how the editors of an oral biography project tried to create a written "voice" for their interviewee—a "voice" containing as many idiosyncratic features of his spoken voice as possible—while, at the same time, depersonalizing the "voices" of the interviewers by omitting all idiosyncratic features. This technique does not, of course, differ much from Mark Twain's use of syntactic, lexical, and mechanical features to distinguish Huck Finn's voice from ole Jim's. Students in any advanced writing class should be encouraged to write—as Walker Gibson put it—"tough, sweet, or stuffy" by being taught to manipulate language on paper as effectively as they do face to face.⁶

Nor is this a particularly difficult task, once the constraints of purpose and audience are clear. Notice, for example, the different voices Amanda Patterson adopts in the memos above. In the version to her fellow counselors, Amanda uses enough short words, personal pronouns, contractions, and loose punctuation to qualify—almost—as one of Gibson's "sweet talkers." On the other hand, in her memo to Mr. Blotner and other superiors at RHA, she sounds downright stuffy! Most students know how to adapt voice in writing, but not how to control this adaptation—to do it consciously, to do it craftily. To help them develop a process which focuses on voice, you can have them ask this set of questions each time they write:

* Is my voice appropriate to my purpose?

* Too formal? Too casual?

*  Is my language appropriate to my audience? Too complicated? Too abstract?

* Is my language appropriate to my audience?

* Too complicated? Too abstract? Too ambiguous?

* Do I use organization, paragraphing, sentence structure, words, and mechanics to enhance my voice?

Organization

The fourth goal, and one that I'm certain we pay considerable attention to, is teaching students to formulate appropriate organizational patterns for their work. I am disturbed by the formulas in business writing textbooks, with their checklists and their signs referring to mechanical errors. I am disturbed by a programmed instruction series in journalism which reduces article writing to a fill - in - the - blanks puzzle. I am even disturbed by my friend Sheridan Baker's keyhole, with its one - solution - fits - all - problems approach to essay writing. These formulas disturb me because they attend only to product.

I prefer to teach process: to discuss possible organizational patterns, to offer options, to emphasize that the solution depends on the problem. Specifically, I want students to conceive of organization as a means of achieving a purpose with an audience. One set of organizational questions which emphasizes process is:

* Does the structure of my discussion support the purpose of my communication? (for example, if making a recommendation or taking a strong position, have I developed my discussion persuasively?)

* Does my structure have an underlying logic, moving from general to specific and from most important to least important (as in business, technical, or journalistic writing) or from least important or most important (as in certain essay forms)?

* Have I chosen appropriate patterns for the various units of my communication?

Have I included, when necessary, units of definition, description, cause/effect, process, persuasion, and so on?

By asking such questions, student writers adapt organization to purpose and audience, as Amanda did in the two preceding memos. The first, an informational summary for peers, moves from general to specific and contains one chronological unit. The second, a persuasive memo for superiors, moves from general to specific, but is developed with two persuasive units: "Findings" contains four reasons, and "Recommendations" demonstrates the ease of implementing the plan. The organization of each communication suits its purpose and audience.

Polish

The fifth essential goal of an advanced writing course is to teach students to polish their work. Polishing is a finishing process, a reviewing process, a checking - for - flaws process, which gives the writer at least some assurance that the communication is as effective as he or she can make it. Polishing encourages the writier to ask:

* Does my format signal the intellectual design of my communication?

* Has my revision succeeded in clarifying this communication for my audience ?

* Has my editing removed distractions such as needless words and mechanical errors?

* Does this communication represent my best writing?

I have not seen the drafts of most of the writing I admire, but I have seen the drafts of the article you are reading, and I can assure you that my review of the format, my revision, and my editing not only cut this paper by a third, but made it more logical, more clear, and more precise. And polishing took me three times as long as writing my first draft!

How to manage audience, purpose, voice, organization, and polishing: this is the underlying structure of any advanced writing course. Put the content of any specific subject – from business writing to scientific writing – on this five legged table and you will have ample support for your teaching. And your students will have learned processes they can apply to any writing challenge they meet  in college or beyond.⁷