You Can't Have Every Fish In The Sea As An Audience (Lame Puns)

Stanley Fish

A question brought up by english teachers and the academic community in general is; “What is college-level writing and how do I incorporate it in my class?” Stanley Fish, a Distinguished professor of Law at Cardozo Law School in New York City, tried answering this in a New York Times article, “What Should Colleges Teach, Part 3.” Fish made many good claims in his paper for example; “You have to start with a simple but deep understanding of the game, which for my purposes is the game of writing sentences. So it makes sense to begin with the question, What is a sentence anyway? My answer has two parts: (1) A sentence is an organization of items in the world. (2) A sentence is a structure of logical relationships.”

Fish believes that the first thing a student should master is sentence structure, he states that students usually don’t learn this before and that its, “College teachers … responsibility to make up the deficit.”

I completely agree with Fish’s statement about the importance of sentence structure, but I, through my own experiences and observations, have come to believe that another important aspect of writing is the importance of a writer knowing who they are targeting or who they are trying to influence, in other words; their audience.

I’ve witnessed the importance of audience while observing tutoring sessions, for eight weeks, at The Ohio State University at Newark Writer’s Studio. My objective was to answer the age old question, “What is college-level writing?”  When considering an audience, a writer must bring into account; the audience’s gender, age, level of education, Religion, culture, social class, etc. Without a proper audience, a writer may stray from the topic they are writing about, which results in a lot of confusion for both the reader and writer.

A writer must know their audience

The Writing Studio at the University of Maryland University College states that knowing your, “Audience helps you to make decisions about what information you should include, how you should arrange that information, and what kind of supporting details will be necessary for the reader to understand what you are presenting.” They go on to explain that, “It also influences the tone and structure of the document. To develop and present an effective argument, you need to be able to appeal to and address your audience.” With an audience a writer can narrow their thesis from a broad point of view to a narrower one. With to broad an audience a writer might have to explain a lot of jargon associated with his topic, but if they narrow their audience, which in turn focuses the thesis, they can skip all the unneeded explanations and get straight to their claim, and not worry about straying from the topic with a long off topic explanation.

Audience and sentence structure are both very important in writing.

The legitimacy of Stanley Fish’s claim; that the best way to teach a college class room is by teaching sentence structure, is completely based on the person who’s reading that claim’s opinion and their experiences. I believe that audience plays a much bigger role in college writing, in spite of the fact that, sentence structure plays a big role, in its own right.

Darcy Pattison, an American writer of fiction and nonfiction children’s literature, states “One of the easiest ways to signal tone and, as a result, audience is to control your sentence structure.”Audience and sentence structure are in some cases closely correlated; Audience determines how a sentence should be structured and sentence structure determines the tone and audience of a paper, one can not exist without the other. In the end, audience and sentence structure is just a small part of what college-level writing truly is, there are many other aspects which are just as important, like thesis statements, details, and quote integration, but if both are mastered and done well, it can help a beginning college-level writer blossom into a great writer.