ESSAY BASICS: WRITER, AUDIENCE, PURPOSE
Writer
Given the needs of students and university and department requirements for students taking required skills courses, the successful ENG 101 essay should demonstrate a student’s writing and thinking capabilities. The ENG 101 essay is written from the writer’s experiences, observations, and a general learned or cultural knowledge. Writer-centered, or writer-based, the ENG 101 essay is dominated by the ideas of the writer, not the ideas of others. Students come to college armed with enough information, imagination, and experience to manage such an essay. As composition teachers, you show students how to shape that information, experience, and knowledge into a coherent, organized, and interesting theme in a composition medium-the essay.
Audience
Essays can be written in first person or third person, in informal language (the level of language suited for most academic work), in lengths of 500 or more words. At this university, it will not benefit students in your writing classes to have them write papers shorter than 500 words or an essay written in overly colloquial or even conversational language, and worse, allowing them to think that such papers are appropriate for college. On the other hand, class room exercises that show students the difference between writing that engages conversational language and writing that engages informal language are useful for explaining how writers can maintain a consistent tone or maintain a consistent and appropriate measure of distance between the writer and audience.
Purpose
The purpose of an essay often determines the distance between the writer and audience, as well as whether first person or third person is appropriate for use. Expository essays are informative or argumentative, at times both; an informative essay presents information on a subject in as objective a manner as possible. An argumentative essay often attempts to persuade, and, thus, is often referred to as a persuasive essay. All argumentative essays need not persuade, however; just as often, argumentative writing informs. Students writing a position paper on First Amendment rights to a general college-level audience with whom they are not familiar can utilize either first or third person, in informal language. On the other hand, writing about characterization in a Flannery O’Connor story will probably require the use of third person and formal diction.
Critical to teaching expository writing to first semester composition students is showing them how to write both informative and argumentative essays using a variety of rhetorical strategies: narration, description, definition, causal analysis, comparison/contrast, analogy, classification, or process analysis. Essays can be strictly narrative or writers can employ narration in only one paragraph; they can be strictly descriptive or writers can employ description in only one paragraph. Rhetorical strategies, however, are not purposive in themselves: a comparison paper must either inform or argue or do both. Students do need to know that they must have a good reason (purpose) for comparing two places they have vacationed. In other words, they must articulate what they learn from the experience. Otherwise, not only will their papers have no purpose, which is vital to a paper’s success, but the audience (you) will find yourself unhappily having to read drafts of essays that compare the main attractions of Seneca, IL to Seneca, NY-to no particular end.
Students who learn what level or kind of language they need to employ in their essays to communicate their ideas, how to address their audience, and why they are writing can successfully complete most writing tasks assigned at SIUE. Having an awareness of themselves as writers, of their audience, and of their reason for writing are habits and practices that often take the course of the semester to learn well. Learning how to control the level of language in a paper is more difficult for those who waver between conversational and informal diction than for those who struggle with writer-audience distance. For some students, argument comes almost naturally, while for others, getting past the narrative or informative essay is a hurdle. Students who most dramatically fail essays often do so because they cannot construct a thesis or support it in depth (purpose), they lack the ability to express themselves intelligently or imaginatively in a controlled language (writer), or they lack an awareness of the distance required between themselves and their readers (audience). Indeed, students’ failure to understand how the writer, audience, and purpose function together probably prevents them from executing a balanced, coherent, cohesive, and grammatically sound essay.
Students who come to understand their role in essay-writing-their responsibilities to their audience and their reason for writing, as well as their sense of themselves as critical thinkers capable of voicing their ideas on given topics--are ready to learn how to communicate their ideas in the essay medium. Briefly, we can define an essay as a written effort with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end-introduction, body, and concluding paragraphs--that forwards a thesis and coherently and cohesively develops it in standard written English. A successful essay embodies ALL of these elements. While an essay might have an introduction that includes a thesis, body paragraphs, and a conclusion, if the body paragraphs do not fully or even adequately support the thesis, then the essay is incomplete, and thus, unsuccessful. If the language used to communicate the thesis is non-standard, error-ridden, vague, or non-specific, the essay is not successful. If paragraphs’ sentences lack order or transitions, the essay is not successful. If an essay is a collection of clichés and tired ideas, it is not successful. The point is, essays are essentially drafts in progress when critical thinking or imagination, purpose, development, organization, and language lack maturity. While many students probably receive passing grades on essays that are somewhere between a third draft and a finished draft, students should be encouraged to write their drafts until they are finished enough to receive a grade, even if that grade is not passing.
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Published by: Department of English Language and Literature
Last Update: July 13, 2003 by English Web Manager
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