Category: Taking it Public

Know the 3 most important factors in real estate? Location, location, location.

Well, for writing, it’s audience.

Take a look at the rubric for your Unit 3 project, and you’ll see this come up again and again–note how many of these items hinge on textual features that are appropriate to the audience. That’s why you need to have a very clear picture of who your audience is, so that you can better assess what they will need and expect from you, so that you can deliver.

Presenting your research in an audience-appropriate fashion is the critical to the success of your communication. You might have terrific information and important new ideas to share, but if you can’t make them land with your audience, there’s little point in you writing in the first place.

That’s why we’ve spent the last couple of weeks looking at texts that weren’t scholarly articles or straightforward academic-style essays. Those genres work really well for certain audiences and purposes–to communicate cutting-edge new ideas to other people with some background knowledge/expertise in the field–but they don’t work well for everybody all the time. We depend upon other genres to communicate in other situations.

And that’s why I’ve asked you to get pretty specific in setting forth the rhetorical situation that you’ve conjured for this text you’re creating. In order to understand and evaluate your work, your readers need to know just who you’re aiming to reach and under what circumstances. (Make sure that you include a brief note explaining all this in the body of your draft post, due by the end of the day on Friday, 7/31).

It’s worth reviewing some of the myriad ways in which audience matters

Decisions about audience and purpose are intrinsically connected–it wouldn’t make sense to provide general knowledge background to people who are already experts, nor would it make sense to lobby entry-level workers for policy change (since they’re not the ones who make those decisions). Your audience and your objective need to be tightly and logically connected.

Your audience dictates various writing choices–how long will you be likely to have your readers’ attention? how much specialized jargon can you use? how much background information will you need to provide? what’s an effective level of detail? what kinds of examples will they be most interested in? what source information will your readers expect to have for their own follow-up? what kind of relationship will you seek to establish with them?

Knowing your audience lets you shape your text to be functional for them–in terms of level of formality, voice, use of graphics/media, visual organization of the text, incorporation of external links, etc.

One of the challenges of writing in non-academic styles is that your academic citation skills might need to flex a bit–in-text parenthetical citations and footnotes simply aren’t appropriate to all genres, but you are still ethically bound to provide information about your sources to your readers.

So how do you do this??

This is one of the reasons I’ve asked you to look for sample texts in the genre you plan to write. In reviewing those samples, please pay attention to how the authors handle sources–do they provide a list of references at the end? (and perhaps numbered footnotes throughout?) do they hyperlink to other articles they’re working with? do they rely on in-text attribution (the sort of “according to X….” phrases)?

There are some formats (i.e. PowerPoint) where fairly traditional academic-style footnotes are still the order of the day. In most cases, though, in these non-academic genres, you’ll see embedded links and in-text attribution as the norm. You need to look closely at some samples to see how authors handle it in these media outlets, and then act accordingly.

Why is this so important?

Well, this is a research course, after all, so we need to approach the particulars of citing research carefully, but this isn’t just some check-off on an assignment. Research-based writing lives and breathes beyond the university, too, so you’ll need to have a variety of tools at your disposal to employ in these situations. You probably won’t be using MLA or APA-style forever, but you will be researching and sharing what you’ve learned for the rest of your career.

It’s also worth considering the ethical implications, which run in two directions. You have an obligation to the authors of the sources you are working with to provide credit where credit is due. Furthermore, you have an obligation to your readers, who need to have ready access to the sources you’ve been using for their own purposes. You’re part of a larger discussion around your issue, remember, and that means that you need to honor those whose work you’re building upon, as well as facilitate those who will want to do more with this topic once you’re done with it.

Note that (as indicated in the assignment rubric on the unit 3 assignment sheet) you have 2 responsibilities–to provide in-text attribution of sources that you are relying upon in building your argument and providing a separate complete bibliography for the sources that have helped to shape your thinking (even if you have not quoted, paraphrased, or cited them in your actual text).

Because this work of figuring out how to cite your sources matters so much, please be sure to integrate these credits into your draft, so that I can give you some feedback on how well it’s working and what adjustments you might need to make. If you have any questions as you’re working, please don’t hesitate to contact me.