Part II: Learning to Consider Audience

Audience has been a recurring concern of writing teachers, not to mention a long-standing element of rhetoric from the Ancients on. Its importance among scholars has fluctuated over time, but Lisa Ede does much to to revitalize the emphasis on audience in her 1979 article "On Audience and Composition." Here Ede suggests that writing teachers and students construct "rhetorical situations," in which writers strive to delineate audience in some detail (294), and the strategy goes a long way toward reducing the artificiality of the composition classroom. Part of the motivation for our discussion project was the hope of further reducing this artificiality, as least for part of the writing our students perform.

Each of us understood asynchronous discussion to supplement the writing that our students were doing, to give them a way to practice the particular skills that the discussion forum could highlight better than a conventional essay assignment. In a discussion with live readers and writers, audience is not only real but palpable. And it's this palpability that gives our project its kick. We also wanted to expose our students to students of another nationality and culture. At first, it might appear that audience awareness and cultural enrichment are two separate gains, with the cross-cultural component an attractive add-on to the main work of learning to consider audience. But they are not separate, especially if paying attention to audience is not just a skill but an attitude, a habit of mind that could easily go by the name of empathy or engagement.

While we are unaware of anyone who has established an on-line discussion between composition classes in the United States and Egypt, we are clearly not the first ones to use the Internet to cross boundaries in the effort to encourage attention to audience. Using the cultural diversity within the United States, Lynne Spigelmire Viti describes her use of e-mail, virtual conferences, and bulletin boards to extend her students' audience beyond the boundaries of a women's college. And giving us a cross-cultural example, Teresa M. Redd describes her work linking black student writers at Howard University with white student artists at Montana State University. These students actually collaborated on textual and visual projects to combat racism. Redd felt the project would help the students in her writing class at Howard to anticipate audience responses.

Before the collaboration Redd set up, students did not always scrutinize their own ideas or convictions. "Classroom discussion," says Redd, "revealed that the topic [of racism] was so emotionally charged, so personally searing, that they could not recognize a hasty generalization, hidden assumption, or even an offensive tone." Redd goes on to explain that the way her students saw her did not elicit the scrutiny she hoped for: "since I was African American, they were liable to assume that I would understand and accept their sweeping claims about racism" (139). Redd seems to be suggesting that effective writers must step outside of cultural walls if those walls confine their thinking about readers. For both Redd and Viti and others the Internet opened up a more complex and varied audience than their local surroundings could provide.