Lesson Plan: Changing for Your Audience

Audience can be a tricky concept for maturing writers to understand. They often don't realize that audiences change depending on the purpose for writing and the situation. Here's a lesson to help your students understand their changing audience and have a bit of fun in the process.

Objectives: Students will be able to identify an audience and change language accordingly.

Materials:
1. Hat, cup, or something else to hold slips of paper.
2. small pieces of paper
3. A common writing prompt.

Directions:
1. Ask students what audience is. Brainstorm for a moment a definition. They should come up with something along the lines of it being who they are writing for.
2. Pass out the pieces of paper. Have the students write the name of a common person, job, or role in society: i.e. possible audiences. For example: bank robber, bus driver, teacher, mom, president, vampire, etc.
3. Collect the pieces of paper and put them in your container.
4. Get two student volunteers. One will be the "presenter" the other will be the "audience." Explain that the presenter will leave the room and will have a goal in mind like they are running for president, trying to sell a product, trying to teach a concept, etc. After the presenter has left the room, the "audience" picks a piece of paper from the container. This the role they have to take on. The presenter has to present their product to the "audience," and in the process, change their approach in an attempt to reach his intended audience and figure out what role the audience has. The game is over when the presenter guesses who the audience is. Switch the presenter and audience. You can do as many rounds as you want.
5. After you finish the game, ask the class what the presenters had to do in order to address their audience. Single in on how language choice, content, style, and sentence fluency change depending on their audience.
6. Place a prompt up on the board. Have the students choose an audience that they came up with as a class and write their answer according to their audience.
7. Share responses.
*You can extend this by giving the students a real prompt and having them figure out their audience and write accordingly.