"Embracing Digital Literacies: A Study of First-Year Students’ Digital Compositions"

Managing and Audience (cont.)

There were numerous examples of how student participants closely interact with their audiences, and how they perceive, manage, and persuade audience members. Revisiting the idea of audience in “Among the Audience: On Audience in an Age of New Literacies,” Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford (2009) note the transitioning, unstable, in flux worlds that writers now write within. They comment:

[W]riters who want and need to shift among worlds must be able to hold flexible views of the real and potential relationships between writing and reading, between author and audience that refuse to remain stable; they must also be able to sort out the competing claims of words, images, and sounds in choosing the best medium or media of communication. And they must also become comfortable with new ways of thinking … about ownership of the messages that are created amidst the dynamic interaction of writers, audiences, and media. (50)

Writing in various contexts and within different discourse communities online is a complex act that requires students to evaluate their audiences. As in most writing situations, it is difficult to thoroughly know and meet the expectations of an audience. However, students are well practiced in their ability to effectively meet the needs of a variety of audiences through the creative efforts they take to understand and connect with online communities. Their understanding of audience demonstrates their capabilities in Beaufort’s rhetorical knowledge and discourse community knowledge domains.

Armed with information about how students cater to online audiences, teachers can have more confidence in their students’ abilities to understand and persuade audiences. Teaching the concept of audience can be made more concrete if we start with what students know. When teachers discuss audience, they might begin by asking students to name the audiences they address in digital writings and the strategies they use to appeal to these audiences. Classes could then apply these strategies to audiences less familiar to students, such as academic audiences. If teachers found, for example, that students in their class use tagging to target a specific audience, teachers might use this knowledge to discuss and compare ways to target academic audiences. Recognizing and appreciating the effective strategies students already use to communicate to digital audiences can help teachers build bridges between students’ self-sponsored and school writing practices.