Description of bottleneck
Audience awareness is a bottleneck that occurs frequently in writing courses, such as in a composition course or an academic writing course. Below is the bottleneck and lesson to get students to get through the bottleneck. (Jeanne Marie Rose; English Department; Pennsylvania State University Berks)
Audience Awareness Bottleneck Lesson
1. Identify a bottleneck: Students struggle with writing, which involves a variety of sub-bottlenecks: Putting ideas into words; audience awareness; rewriting and editing; sense of not being a good writer; syntax and grammar. Prof. Rose selected audience awareness for her most difficult bottleneck in her course.
2.Decode the mental move for audience awareness: Being able to imagine an audience, put yourself in their place, anticipate their needs, then meet those needs.
3. Model with analogy: Imagining yourself as a tour guide for your audience, leading them through an unfamiliar landscape of ideas and pointing out familiar landmarks to help them navigate.
4. Practice: Answer audience awareness Qs prior to writing assignments: Who are your readers? What do they know? What do they value? What do they need from your writing?
5. Motivate: Keep a specific reader in mind. Realizing that someone will read their writing, whether it is the instructor or peers, or other readers, encourages student writers to craft their work more thoughtfully and persist through challenges.
6. Assess: Documented Problem Solution—Answer questions in 1st column; reflect on those answers in 2nd column for insights gained.
7. Share: Coordinate with colleagues who teach the same course and face the same bottleneck so they, too, can avoid it by Decoding audience awareness.
Related scholarly work on this bottleneck
Downs, Doug, and Liane Robertson. "Threshold concepts in first-year composition." Adler-Kassner and Wardle (2015): 105-21
People interested in this bottleneck
Anyone teaching writing in a course. whether an academic writing course, or a general writing course, might be interested in this bottleneck.
References
Hood, L. & Middendorf, J. (submitted) AI as Co-Decoder: Where can AI serve as a conversation partner? Transformative Dialogues Teaching and Learning Journal.
