Of Audiences and Ebooks

As a writing instructor and a rhetoric scholar, audience is something I think about on a regular basis. When I talk about the rhetorical triangle with my students, I try to convince them that to be persuasive, they need to think deeply about their audience -- their values, communities, knowledge, emotions, etc. And they need to let what they know about their audience shape what and how they write. I ask them to imagine an audience who needs to hear what they have to say and write to them.

This is the Rhetorical Triangle if you don't remember it from your first year composition course.

The trouble with this approach, however, is that I know and my students know that I am the actual audience for most of what they write. It's not a terribly far logical leap to go from "Write to your audience" to "Write what your teacher wants to hear," even though that is the last thing I want my students to learn.

Some teachers try to overcome this obstacle by asking students to write letters to some authority figure about a problem the class has researched, but few such letter-writing campaigns have resulted in policy changes (I don't know of any, personally), which means that students still tend to view this as a school genre with no significant audience. Others try to at least have students publish their work to a blog or YouTube so that they have an authentic audience, though I fear that too often teachers are just asking students to complete the same old school genres (essay, report, argument, etc.), just posted online.

I like Jon Smith's approach to this problem using ebooks. He describes how his fifth grade Special Education students hated writing for just him, their teacher, and especially hated all of the prompts for writing that he provided. When he gave them an actual audience in the form of an ebook available on iTunes, however, they came up with their own prompt, their own motivation for writing. As other teachers in his school district adopted his approach, I noticed a common theme among what students produced: they created books that would teach others what they were currently learning. Now on the one hand, these books still represent a school genre in the form of a textbook, but rather than being what students passively consume, it is something they actively create.

Does this mean that my first year college writing students will be producing ebooks from now on? I don't know. But my 11-year-old daughter has been enthusiastically writing a book for the past week, and I love the idea of her using this software for school purposes as well. Creating an ebook to demonstrate what she has learned at the end of a unit rather than taking a test sounds particularly appealing to me. I'm not convinced that what she produces will necessarily be worthy of the 24,000+ readers that Smith's students have gained, but I am sure that her belief that she could have such an audience will motivate her to create better work than she would otherwise have made.