Jackson: I like keep it pretty basic, pretty fun, nice relevant examples in the classroom. And so we just talk about how purpose and audience essentially shapes, again, every other decision that you will make as a writer. So once you have your topic and you have the purpose of the audience, then that helps you decide how you're going to structure your sentences, how you're going to organize your essay, the word choices that you make, the tone, all those different things are shaped by purpose and audience.

So a really basic example I like to use with my first year students is to talk about their first week in college. We have a week of welcome here on our campus, and they learn all about the different things that happens at the university. And so I'll say, OK, if you were to tell me, your professor, about your first week at our university, what types of things would you tell me about? And so they say, they would tell me about their classes, and they might tell me about their professors, and they may say a little bit about their roommates or things like that, mostly things academic in nature.

And then I say, OK, pretend your best friend from home calls you up who's never been on campus and says, tell me about your first week at the university? What would you talk about? And so then they always start laughing, and they say they would talk about the cafeteria, about who they saw in the cafeteria, who they thought was cute, what were the parties like. They say that the language choices would be different because they know there are some words that they would think that I wouldn't understand or wouldn't be appropriate for me as their professor to listen to.

And so we just kind of have that discussion about how purpose and audience then shapes the way that you talk about different ideas.