I respectfully disagree with Paul and sign more with Martin and original
message by Rachel on the issue of high school writing.
Martin wrote,
> Paul is certainly right to point to the developmental importance of play
and
> fantasy with an imagined audience, and there are rich rhetorical and
poetic
> possibilities in addressing fictitious audiences. Nonetheless, most
school
> writing remains problematic because the ostensible purposes (persuade,
> inform, etc.) of assigned writing tasks typically diverge from the actual
> purposes (evaluation). In English composition, students rarely need to
> actually persuade an instructor about the argument they make; they must
> merely present a paper that the teacher judges to be a passable example of
> the genre. And how likely is it that students might really inform their
> teachers when the questions are test questions, both in class and in
> writing? The most instructive challenges for beginning writers are
> persuading someone open to persuasion and successfully explaining
something
> to someone who needs to be informed.
>
I think high school students are often asked not communicate with imagined
audience of readers but with rather the real audience of evaluators and
testers. As student character of a famous Russian movie "Let's survive until
Monday" ("Dozhivem do ponedel'nika") says student's school success is based
on two strategies: guess what the teacher wants and please the teacher
("Guess and Please!").
Eugene