Writing Up and Down the Social Ladder: A Study of Experienced Writers Composing for Contrasting Audiences

This study explores audience awareness of writers as they compose for contrasting audiences. Experienced writers—all of them writing instructors at large public universities―composed aloud for two audiences which differed along the dimension of authority: incoming freshmen and a faculty committee. Protocols were analyzed for patterns of writing activities among all writers and for individual writers. Among all writers, two clear patterns emerged. Writers analyzed the faculty audience less frequently than the freshman audience, but they evaluated their text and writing goals more frequently when addressing the faculty. For individual writers, strong “interpretive frameworks” emerged, unique ways in which writersi nterpreted audiences and writing tasks, foregrounding quite different elements of the rhetorical situation. At times, interpretive frameworks overrode differences between the two audiences presented in the writing tasks; that is, writers attributed the same characteristics to both audiences despite the difference in these audiences’ social status within the university structure.