Letter to the Editor

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 | Uncategorized

Chapter 6: Teaching Audience and Voice

Informal Response

This chapter talks a lot about teaching students how to write for an audience. The book started off the topic by giving an example of a graduate student who struggled to find and write for an audience in his work. I think this is a very common problem among writers of all ages. This problem fits hand in hand with motivation. If a student does not feel there is a purpose for his or her writing they will lack motivation, which is why knowing one’s audience is so important in terms of motivating students. Students need to feel there is a purpose to their writing. Neman gave a few examples of activities to help students to find an audience and write for a specific audience.

The first activity she provided was having students write to a pretend audience. An example would be to have students reply or respond directly to a character in a book. Not only would this help the student to find their audience but it would also allow them to analyze the text and formulate an opinion. I think this is a good idea to use once or twice during the year but it would depend on the age group of the students. I think the pretend audience assignment would be more exiting and helpful for younger students such as middle-school age. However, I think a high school student could potentially find this boring or unrealistic.

In my opinion high school students would benefit more from Neman’s other activity which was finding an actual audience. This would include letters to the editor. I have always found activities like this to be very motivating and fun. For example, when I was in high school we were asked to write a letter to a company, government official, newspaper or whatever we wanted. We had to write to a complaint letter about something that we genuinely felt strongly about. Some people wrote to the city about the potholes in roads, some wrote to shoe companies about problems they had with their merchandise and much more. This was one of my favorite and most memorable assignments because we all took it very seriously. We perfected to letters, postmarked them, and sent them to their respective places. I think it was so successful because people cared about what they were writing about and they wanted to be taken seriously so they worked very hard. It was really cool because surprisingly a lot of students got a response back. One student in specific that wrote to a shoe company received a letter and a gift card.

The reason I like the letter to the editor activity so much is because it gives the students a sense of purpose and it allows them to become very motivated and invested in their work. This opens a lot of doors for us as teachers because the students are willing to listen because they want their work to be the best it can be so it is taken seriously. I plan to use this assignment in my classroom someday and I hope that companies respond so I can keep the letters to show students as motivation to write well.