Audience Adaptation in the Essays of Proficient and Nonproficient Freshman Writers

Abstract

This study investigated the assumption that proficient writers, unlike nonproficient ones, adapt their essays for a particular and occasion. Good and poor writers wrote a persuasive essay for a real that expressed topic-relevant attitudes and opinions in an interview presentation. Essays were then coded for ideas mentioned in the interview. Results showed that good writers take greater advantage of information than poor writers, but that good and poor writers both favor adaptations from explicit statements over more subtle statements. Studies of in human communication help to show how individuals manage in a world of diverse attitudes and opinions. Researchers in related disciplines, recognizing that effective discourse requires an understanding of situation including aspects of have shown many ways that people alter their messages for different contexts. In the field of writing, however, situational influences have received relatively little attention, though today's textbooks devote many more pages than before to matters of and intention. Overall, there seems to be little consensus about just how aspects of are manifested in writing. I use the term here and elsewhere as a general term to denote issues of awareness and adaptation. Where necessary, I distinguish between awareness, which refers to a writer's or speaker's focus of on readers or listeners irrespective of the communicator's language behavior, and adaptation, which refers to the audience-conditioned language behavior resulting from this awareness. What constitutes adaptation and how it can be measured is a question not always faced squarely by researchers. Some investigators have adopted quite general (and vague) criteria. In a study conducted by Flower and Hayes (1980), for example, categories labeled audience and reader and response to the larger rhetorical problem were used in analyzing protocols for evidence of awareness. Similarly, Hilgers (1980) rated adaptation in students' writing samples according to the criterion attention to the specific needs of the audience. This article is adapted from the author's doctoral dissertation from the Department of Language Education, University of Georgia, 1984, under the direction of Donald L. Rubin. Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 19, No. 3, October 1985

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