Targeting a College Audience

Many of your college assignments, like Assignment 1 in Writing for Your Audience, may assume that you are addressing general college readers, represented by your instructor and possibly your classmates. Such readers typically expect clear, logical writing with supporting evidence to explain or persuade. Of course, the format, approach, or evidence may differ by field. For example, biologists might expect the findings from your experiment while literature specialists might look for relevant quotations from the novel you’re analyzing.

COLLEGE AUDIENCE CHECKLIST

For more strategies for future college writing, see Ch. 24.

  • How has your instructor advised you to write for readers? What criteria related to audience will be used for grading your papers?
  • What do the assigned readings in your course assume about an audience? Has your instructor recommended models or sample readings?
  • What topics, issues, and problems intrigue readers in the course area? What puzzles do they want to solve? How do they want to solve them?
  • How is writing in the course area commonly organized? For example, do writers tend to follow a persuasive pattern — introducing the issue, stating an assertion or a claim, backing the claim with logical points and supporting evidence, acknowledging other views, and concluding? Or do they use conventional headings — perhaps Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Findings, and Discussion?
  • What evidence typically supports ideas or interpretations — facts and statistics, quotations from texts, summaries of research, references to authorities or prior studies, experimental findings, observations, or interviews?
  • What style, tone, and level of formality do writers in the field use?