Writing with an Audience in Mind

Writing provides students with the opportunity to learn about themselves and their connection to the world. When students are given numerous opportunities to write they are building the skills to organize their ideas and be effective communicators, the writing process allows them to clarify their thinking and express their thoughts and feelings. Through various writing assignments students are expected to create products of interesting, original, and independent critical thought, but what happens when we do not provide students with opportunities of various ways they can present their ideas?

According to the article Gradually Releasing Responsibility to Students Writing Persuasive Texts, there are three kinds of texts that students need to learn to write; argument, exposition, and narrative. The article also says, "Given that many teachers neglect the teaching of writing altogether, or focus more on narrative texts, this emphasis on the Common Core on writing means that students need more experience with writing argument or exposition." (p.4) As important as I believe creative writing to be and that students should be creating narratives, developing characters and crossing boundaries of what standard academic writing provides to them. I do also believe that there should be much more emphasis on argument and exposition; with these two types of texts students are better able to delve into the ideas that they feel passionate about and organize supportive information to be presented to an audience.

And this is where I would like to pose my question....

How do we teach students how to effectively communicate their ideas to an audience?

Yes, we know from the above article that we are able to use the IMSCI model for scaffolding writing instruction (more information on IMSCI model here). But what exactly are we modelling? What do we want our students to know about how to effectively prepare and communicate ideas through argument and exposition and how to present their products to an audience?

Nancy Duarte. Uncovering the Common Structure of Greatest Communicators. TEDxEast. November 11, 2010. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nYFpuc2Umk

Nancy Duarte, in the TEDxEast talk above, explains the model that she has developed for creating transformative presentations through analyzing speeches by Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs. 

Duarte in her talk states, "You have the power to change the world... Deep inside of you, every single one of you has the most powerful device known to man. And that's an idea." She continues to explain the process of how she came up with her model of transformative presentations but first she makes a riveting point by using hero archetypes in comparison. That is that we are not the heroes of our ideas, the audience are the heroes of our ideas, because we can have an idea but it needs to spread in order for it to be effective. She goes on to explain the role of the hero archetype; there is a likeable hero in an ordinary world and they get this call to adventure, which then their world is brought out of balance. At first they are resistant, and then a mentor comes along and helps them move from their ordinary world into a special world. And that is the role of the presenter, to be the mentor, so as writers we are presenting our idea to an audience and helping them move from one thing into our new, special idea, and that is the power of the story. 

Background Image: WarriorProse.com. November 24, 2010. URL: http://bit.ly/1lmtN55

Duarte explains the shape-structure of stories, and asks if a presentation had a shape what would it look like? And how do the greatest communicators use that shape if there is even a shape? Using Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech and Steve Jobs' 2007 iPhone Launch speech and overlaid the two on this structure and found that both fit. Duarte found that these speeches both started with establishing "What is" (the status quo, the commonplace), which needs to be compared with "What could be" (imagine a different future because of this special idea). And that gap between the two needs to be made as big as possible and highly contrasted. This shape goes back and forth, up and down between the what is and what could be until there is a call to action, a new bliss, which is presented in a poetic and dramatic way. 

Shape of story based on Duarte's structure of an effective presentation
(Chamberlain, 2015)

Duarte also uses this model to analyze the transcripts of both Martin Luther King's and Steve Jobs' speeches in depth to find what what types of techniques they have used in their speeches that had made them so effective. She finds that the presenters model for their audience what they want them to feel (ex. Isn't this wonderful?) and compelling them to feel a certain way. They turn to a personal story to keep the audience involved or anecdotes, they use a lot of metaphors people are familiar with and visual scenes with their words to take complicated ideas and make them memorable. And in the new bliss they use familiar quotes, or songs, or pieces from scripture that reach inside the hearts of the audience and what is important to them as a device to connect and resonate with the audience to paint this picture of a new bliss. 

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When we are thinking about teaching argument and exposition to our students we should not only be modelling how to properly write, but how to properly write with an audience in mind. Using some of the techniques in Duarte's model of what makes an effective presentation, we can properly teach students what they should be keeping in mind when conveying their idea to an audience and what is going to make that idea connect and resonate with them. Writing argument and exposition can be looked at as a presentation, students are presenting their ideas to the world and this basis Duarte has conveyed will help students to effectively communicate their ideas.


References:
Ministry of Education. The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1 -8: Language. 2006. Accessed: November 12, 2015. URL: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/language18currb.pdf

Nancy Duarte. Uncovering the Common Structure of Greatest Communicators. TEDxEast. November 11, 2010. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nYFpuc2Umk

Read, S., Landon-Hays, M. & Martin-Rivas, A. (2014). Gradually releasing responsibility to students writing persuasive text. The Reading Teacher, 67(6), 469-477. URL: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.library.brocku.ca/doi/10.1002/trtr.1239/abstract