Tentative Conclusions

1. Women students seem flexible about considering and addressing new audiences in their writing. They are quite willing to try out new audiences, both fictional (as in the early assignments shown in this text) and authentic (the memo to the legislator, the real life law essay for other class members and ultimately, for webpage readers from outside the college community).

2. These students were cooperative. They invested, however temporarily, into the importance of defining, anticipating, and even drawing in real readers of their writing.

3. My women students work collaboratively. They quickly became used to, and seem even to have enjoyed, reading one another's writing in the Student Drop folder of our electronic sub-conference. Often, they responded to or raised questions about their peers' writing, posted in Student Drop, without my requiring them to do so.

4. These students are comfortable with electronic technology. They enjoy electronic forums both within the context of our class as well as college -wide forums and forums in the cyberworld at large.(ˆ1)

5. These students have a strong desire to communicate their ideas. They want to make genuine connections with a real audience in their writing, and to try out audiences in addition to their instructor and the College's writing tutors.

6. These students quickly learn to transfer new knowledge about audience to other writing tasks, outside this course. These new writing venues range from other academic courses to writing in internships and in school-year and summer jobs.


Concerns and Ongoing Questions

An evaluation of students' development of a sense of audience and how to construct a new audience for their writing must necessarily include a few worries on my part.

•Is the development of audience awareness and the ability to construct a wider readership for their reading, demonstrated by these students, merely temporary, or will they regress, or revert to the old formula, ascertaining what the teacher wants and producing it?

•In making conclusions about the ways in which they became more sensitive to their audience in this course, are students merely retrofitting the audience to the texts they have already written?

•Are women students more receptive to a teacher's demands that they consider audience in their writing merely because these students want to please the instructor? Or, are women students more open to the idea that the writer must form a relationship with her audience?

•Are women students more comfortable engaging with an audience they know, as in a classroom setting, or with an individual they know, a writing teacher in a small class of fifteen students?

•Will their engagement with a wide audience, particularly an audience of unknown readers, be as successful as their engagement, as writers, with their classmates and their writing instructor?

•To what extent does forcing students to use electronic technology to convey their writing to an audience, either addressed or invoked, demystify communication for women writer's, in Abby's words? Are women students more fearful of technology at the start than their male counterparts, but more transformed by using technology to reach, and even to define, an audience for their writing?

ˆ1. A timely example of an electronic forum outside our college community is the Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project, sponsored by Trinity College and coordinated by Professor Beverly C. Wall, Director, Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric. Students in my Fall 2000 writing classes are participating in this project, joining students of twenty-two teachers from thirteen other colleges and universities, to discuss issues related to the 2000 national and state elections, and in particular. This project will culminate in a conference at Trinity College on November 17, 2000, where students who have engaged in electronic debate about issues ranging from the right of privacy to free speech to censorship and the arts, to public education, will meet to continue their on-line arguments in a face-to-face setting.