Teaching Grounded Audiences: Burke's Identification in Social Media and First Year Composition

Abstract

First year composition students regularly engage in composing rhetorical messages to their virtual audiences while participating on social media. This previous experience and prior knowledge with audiences in social media can transfer to audience awareness and appeal in academic writing. While composition scholars have continued to stress the potential these sites have in their use in composition and analysis, more research is needed regarding the transfer of students’ previous experience and prior knowledge with audience in social networking to academic writing. Social media users consciously or unconsciously appeal to a specific audience, their friends/followers. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke described this interaction as identification. He describes how individuals will persuade their audience by “identifying” with them in certain ways. This current pilot study analyzed how students were able to use Perkins and Salomon’s high road transfer theory to transfer audience awareness from their social networking experience to academic writing in my first year composition class. I taught students a unit on Identification and Social Media at the beginning of the semester, and students analyzed their own social media profiles to observe how they already practice identification unconsciously. Students then applied Burke’s identification theory to the academic writing they did later in the semester. Overall, students applied their audience awareness that they practiced in social media to their academic writing. Also, the students not only increased in their use of identification over the semester, but also demonstrated close audience awareness and adaptation by increasing their identification to their specific audiences.