Professional Roles: Inventing Writers for Imagined Readers

Careful audience analysis should be a major focus of the rhetorical side of technical writing courses for university undergraduates. Student writers need to be taught to appreciate their readers' problems, interests, and motives. Most often, audience analysis is accomplished imaginatively--authors create mental images of their readers. Students can learn this by writing a short paper for an expert audience (defined by the student) about some problem, development, or new knowledge in their major field. Students are grouped by discipline and asked to imagine themselves as the intended readers while they respond to early drafts of these specialist papers. The result of these audience role playing sessions is that the authors get a sense of what a knowledgeable professional or expert audience can be expected to know, and what level of discourse is appropriate. They also learn how to demonstrate their competence to both fellow experts and their superiors through an executive review, for which authors present the essential findings of the specialist paper in a three-minute extemporaneous speech followed by five minutes of questions. Through these activities, many students learn about professional responsibility and realize how documents can function as more than vehicles for the exchange of information. (SRT)