Agreed. The point then is not the fictitiousness of the audience per se,
but the ways writing is occasioned, the typical social relations of the
class, and the kinds of responses made to writing by the institutionally
dominant audience for most work--the teacher (or sometimes other students
acting as surrogate teachers). In terms of the tennis analogy, if the
instructor would actually play with you (probably adjusting her level of
play and still giving some pointers), I'd guess you'd find it a useful
learning experience even if it weren't a "real tennis match." For that
matter, throwing novice players into real tennis matches might not be
optimal for learning either.
>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.
>
>When I learned to play tennis, I found my teacher's technical comments from
>the sidelines quite helpful as I batted a bucket of balls (just the balls,
>eventually) over the net. But it was no substitute for actual play with
>someone on the other side of the net. Writing in school is too much like
>the former, and student writers get all too little experience with readers
>taking their purposes at face value "on the other side" of their texts.
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign