Contents
Cal Poly Pomona

Students: General Writing Tips

Audience and Purpose

Audience and purpose are the two most important rhetorical concepts for the student writer. Who you are writing for and what you are trying to do influence every aspect of the writing task, yet many academic assignments do not specify an audience and do not have a clear rhetorical purpose. Without this information to focus the task, you may have trouble getting started on the writing, or have trouble making decisions about what to include and what to leave out.

Personal Letters

Imagine you are going to write a letter describing your experiences in your first quarter of college to the following people:

  • Your best friend
  • Your mother or father
  • Your brother or sister
  • An aunt or uncle who lives far away
  • A high school sweetheart
  • A favorite teacher or coach
  • A prospective employer
  • A scholarship organization

Would you send the same letter to each person? Would you talk about the same events? Would you leave things out of one letter that you might put in another? How would the language and style be different? 

When you are writing a personal letter the audience is usually one person, often a person you know very well. In such a situation, words come easily, because audience and purpose are well-defined and familiar.

Other Real-world Situations

A business writing situation is usually more complex. Often you know the position and responsibilities of the reader, and the purpose of the writing, but you may not know the reader as an individual. Many real-world writing situations involve audiences that the writer must partially or wholly imagine. The ability to imagine different audiences and serve their various needs is an important measure of a writer's fluency.

Academic Assignments

Academic assignments create a situation in which a dual rhetoric is involved. There is an element of pretense, because the writing is not for a real world situation. There is usually a hypothetical, pretended, audience for the writing, in addition to the "real" audience, the instructor. The needs of these two audiences are quite different, and the conflict between the two can be confusing. For example, you may be writing an informative report, but you may feel that the instructor already knows all the information you have to present. How do you choose what to include and what to leave out if the reader already knows everything?

Parallel to the problem of dual audiences is the problem of purpose. The immediate purpose is to influence the instructor to give a good grade, but the document usually has another hypothetical function related to the assignment.

Identifying the Audience

The following questions will help you identify the intended audience:

  • The teacher is one reader, but most assignments have other hypothetical readers that students are supposed to address. Who are they?
  • What do these readers know about the topic? What do they need to know?
  • What are these readers likely to believe about this topic? Are they likely to agree or disagree with you?
  • If this assignment were a real-world piece of writing, how would readers use it? What would they use it for? Would the writing, as it exists, serve their needs?

Discovering the Purpose

The following questions will help you discover your purpose:

  • What is the instructor’s purpose in making the assignment? What does the instructor want you to learn? What kind of knowledge does the instructor want you to demonstrate?
  • What is your purpose as a writer (besides getting a good grade)? Is it to sell something, explain something, describe how to do something, persuade the reader of something, record or document something?
  • Is the writing effective in accomplishing your purpose? Is the style appropriate? Is the organization what the audience expects? Are your arguments convincing and well-supported?
  • What role are you supposed to play as a writer in this situation? Are you supposed to write as a layman, a professional-in-training, a full-fledged member of the profession, or in some other role?
  • Practice: With a partner or in a group discussion, apply the questions above to a draft of an essay or other assignment.