Seeing Your Writing Through Your Audience's Eyes

      Looking back on the article about real-world audiences which we read last week, I find myself really connecting those articles to the project we are doing in ENGL 4790 right now. I put thought into how to give my students a real-life audience, and now myself and my group must create a Summer Writing Camp, as if it were very real. It's interesting because I'm seeing first-hand some of the challenges that students might face while doing a project for a "real-world audience", and I can then translate to a better sense of how to teach an assignment for this type of audience.
    One of our biggest challenges in doing Project 1 is, "How do we make this appealing and engaging?". We sort of have to put ourselves in the shoes of our audience and ask ourselves what our audience would want to hear, while also conveying important information. Sometimes when you cannot come up with a way to make your information, or in this case, a proposal, engaging, you may have to change your strategy or even your ideas. For example, our group had a name for a camp, but we could not find any way to make it engaging for adolescents. Because we put ourselves in their shoes and did not find it to be engaging or appealing, we moved on to a new idea and made it more exciting and intriguing.

     As I mentioned before, this experience can directly translate into a way for me to teach writing more effectively. I need to teach students to see their own writing through the eyes of their audience! (This is a pretty exciting revelation for me, as I didn't even think of this strategy when I was reading our article about real-world audiences last week.) If students can put themselves in their audiences' shoes, they may be able to write a more effective letter, paper, whatever it may be. It may also help them go back and revise. They can ask themselves, "How does this sound to (insert audience here)?", or "What would they think of this phrase?". It sounds simple, but when learning to write effectively and to write with impact, students may not necessarily think of this simple step. It's my job to step in and help them see their own writing through the eyes of their audience.