Produce writing suited to task, purpose and audience, revise it with feedback and publish it with technology

Learning goal: Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization and style are appropriate to the task, purpose and audience; with some guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing by planning, revising, editing, rewriting or trying a new approach, focusing on how well the purpose and audience have been addressed; and use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to present the relationships between information and ideas clearly and efficiently.

The same information can be written well or badly depending on who will read it and why. A paragraph that suits a science teacher grading a lab report may be useless on a poster read by visitors walking past a table, and a chart that makes a relationship obvious on a screen may be unreadable when printed. This lesson treats writing as a set of decisions about task, purpose and audience, and treats revision as the process of checking those decisions with other people.

Task, purpose and audience. The task is what the assignment asks for: a lab report, a narration, a summary, a set of instructions. The purpose is what the writing should accomplish: inform, explain a procedure, persuade, record. The audience is who will read it and what they already know. These three settings determine three features of the writing. Development is how much detail and which kinds: a teacher grading a report needs the procedure in full; a visitor at a science fair needs the question, the pattern and one number. Organization is the order and the grouping: a report follows the discipline's headings; a poster puts the finding first because visitors may read only the top line. Style is the level of formality and the vocabulary: precise domain words for an expert audience, defined or replaced for a general one. Writing is clear when a reader in the intended audience understands each sentence on the first reading, and coherent when each part connects to the parts around it and to the purpose.

A model rewritten for two audiences. Consider the pendulum finding from the previous lesson. Here is the same information written for two audiences.

Original model text A — Results paragraph for a formal lab report (audience: teacher and classmates who know the procedure). "Increasing the string length increased the time for ten swings in every trial: 10.0 s at 25 cm, 14.2 s at 50 cm and 20.1 s at 100 cm (Table 1). The ratio of successive times was approximately 1.4 for each doubling of length, so quadrupling the length approximately doubled the period. Replacing the 12 g washer with a 24 g washer at 50 cm changed the time for ten swings from 14.2 s to 14.3 s, a difference smaller than the range across repeated trials at a fixed length (0.2 s). Within the precision of a hand-operated stopwatch, mass therefore had no measurable effect on the period, and length was the controlling variable for swings of about 10 degrees or less."

Original model text B — Panel for a science-fair poster (audience: visitors of all ages who have thirty seconds). "A longer string makes a slower swing. We timed a washer swinging on a string. When the string was four times longer, each swing took about twice as long: 1 second at 25 cm, 2 seconds at 100 cm. A washer twice as heavy took about the same time for each swing. For these small swings, length mattered; weight made no difference we could measure. See the chart below."

Text A is developed in full, organized as data, then ratio, then the mass comparison, then the bounded conclusion, and written in domain vocabulary (period, controlling variable, precision). Text B leads with the finding, rounds 1.00 s and 2.01 s to whole seconds because the audience needs the pattern rather than the extra decimal places, replaces period with each swing, and uses a heading. Neither text is better in general. Text B in a lab report would lose the data a grader must check; Text A on a poster would probably not be read.

Planning. Before drafting, write the three settings at the top of the page: task, purpose, audience. Then decide the development, organization and style from them. A plan for Text B is three lines: finding first, one comparison with rounded numbers, one sentence on mass. A plan for Text A is the report's headings with the data slotted under each.

Revising with guidance from peers and adults. Revision means changing the content, the organization or the style, including word choice, so that the writing reaches its purpose and audience; editing means correcting the surface against conventions such as spelling, punctuation and units. Do them in that order, and do the first with help. A useful peer conference asks one question: Did this reach the audience for its purpose? Give the reader only the settings, not your intentions, and ask them to read as that audience. A classmate reading Text B as a visitor might report, "I did not know what a washer was." That is feedback about audience, and the fix is to change washer to metal ring or add a photo. An adult reading Text A as a grader might ask where the 0.2 s trial range came from; the fix is to add the repeated-trial data to Table 1. Feedback about purpose and audience is worth more than feedback about commas, which the writer can fix alone later.

Rewriting or trying a new approach. Sometimes revision is not enough: the draft is organized for the wrong audience, and patching sentences will not save it. Then rewrite, or try a new approach: turn the paragraph into a labeled diagram, turn the list of steps into a numbered checklist, or lead with the conclusion instead of the question. Trying a new approach is not failure; it is what writers do when the peer conference shows the first approach did not reach the audience. Deciding between the two takes one more question to the reader: where exactly, and why? A reader lost at one undefined word or one tangled opening sentence needs a revision; a reader who could not tell what the text was for, or where to look, needs a new approach. Both are revision strategies, and trying a new approach is the one for when the form itself failed.

Editing. After the content is right, edit for sentence boundaries, agreement, spelling, and the conventions of the discipline: units after every measurement, a space between number and unit, italics or quotation marks used consistently, sources attributed the same way each time.

Using technology to produce, publish and present relationships. A word processor or shared document lets several writers draft the same report and lets a peer leave comments beside the sentence they concern. A spreadsheet turns the pendulum data into a chart in seconds, and a chart presents the relationship between length and time more efficiently than a paragraph: the reader sees the bars grow before reading a word. Headings, a table of contents and hyperlinks let a reader on a screen jump to the section they need, which is what "efficiently" means here. Publishing on the Internet, on a class site or a shared drive, reaches the intended audience and lets them respond; it also demands care, because a published text can be copied, so every quotation must be attributed and every graphic labeled before it goes out. Multimedia, such as a thirty-second video of the pendulum, can show a procedure that words describe slowly. The rule for every tool is the same as for every sentence: does it make the relationship between the information and the idea clearer for this audience?

Worked audience diagnosis: A student pastes Text A onto a poster. A visitor reads "The ratio of successive times was approximately 1.4 for each doubling of length" and walks away. The writing is correct but not appropriate to the audience: its development is too detailed, its organization delays the finding, and its style assumes the reader knows what a ratio of successive times is. The fix is not to edit the sentence but to rewrite for the poster: lead with "A longer string makes a slower swing," give one rounded comparison, and move the ratio to a handout for visitors who ask.

Worked peer-conference note: Feedback: "I liked it, but fix the spelling of swinging." This is editing feedback and it comes too early. The writer asks a better question: "Read this as a visitor with thirty seconds. Where did you stop?" The peer answers: "At washer, I did not know what that was." Now the writer has purpose-and-audience feedback and can act on it: add a photograph or write metal ring. The spelling gets fixed at the editing stage.

Worked new approach: A draft explaining how a canal lock works runs to four paragraphs of prose, and two peers both say they got lost at the second gate. Rather than revising sentence by sentence, the writer tries a new approach: a numbered sequence of five steps, each with a small labeled diagram of the lock showing the water level, published as a single page with the steps beside the pictures. The relationship between the information (the water levels) and the idea (boats rise and fall by moving water, not by lifting the boat) is now presented clearly and efficiently, and the prose shrinks to a caption for each step.

Worked technology choice: A group wants to show that pendulum time depends on length. Option one: a paragraph listing 10.0 s, 14.2 s and 20.1 s. Option two: a bar chart made in a spreadsheet from the same three numbers. Option three: a table with length in one column and time in the other. For a poster, the chart wins because the growing bars show the relationship at a glance. For the report, the table wins because a grader needs the exact values and the repeated trials. The paragraph is kept in both, but shortened to point at the graphic.

Settings and plan task: Choose one piece of information from your current science or history unit. Write it twice: once for a reader who is an expert in the subject and needs the full detail, and once for a younger student or a visitor who needs the point in under a minute. Before each version, write the task, purpose and audience in three lines, and after each version, list the three decisions you made about development, organization and style. Exchange with a partner who reads each version as its intended audience and reports where it succeeded and where they stopped.

Independent performance: Take a draft you have already written in a history, science or technical class this year. (1) Write its task, purpose and audience at the top. (2) Hold a peer or adult conference in which the reader reads as the audience and answers only: did the writing reach me for its purpose, and where did it fail? (3) Revise the content and organization in response; if the reader was lost, ask where and why, and if the answer shows that the form itself failed rather than one term or one sentence, try a new approach (a different lead, a diagram, a checklist) rather than patching. (4) Edit for conventions, including units and consistent attribution. (5) Produce the final version with technology: a shared document with headings, at least one table or chart made from your own data or sources, and a link or a labeled image or short video where it makes a relationship clearer. (6) Publish it to the class site or shared folder with every quotation attributed. Success criteria: the reader from step 2 rereads the final version and confirms that each failure they named has been addressed, and every graphic is referred to in the prose and has a caption, with units on any measured quantity.