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

Students’ Knowledge of Audience

Beaufort (2007) discusses audience under two different sections of her five-part knowledge schema: discourse community knowledge and rhetorical knowledge. According to Beaufort, discourse community knowledge entails awareness of the surrounding values and goals of the discourse community that the writing addresses. Rhetorical knowledge, on the other hand, requires knowledge of the rhetorical situation or context of a text, including understanding the text’s audience and purpose. In Beaufort’s words, “writers must address the specific, immediate rhetorical situation of individual communicative acts. This includes considering the specific audience and purpose for a particular text and how best to communicate rhetorically in that instance” (p. 20).

In digital literacies practices, participatory media such as Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook are a constant give-and-take between writer and reader. Oftentimes readers post words of another writer and vice versa – the lines are blurred between audience and author. These unique rhetorical situations require careful decision making to know what words are best. The following is what I looked for in student writers’ digital writing: to what extent are they able to pay close attention to the rhetorical context they are writing within? What is their understanding of the audience their text addresses, as well as the larger discourse community audience? And what rhetorical moves do they make to cue or connect to their audience? Students in this study demonstrated knowledge of both domains – discourse community and rhetorical – by their understanding of audience.