Development in Syntactic and Strategic Aspects of Audience Adaptation Skills in Written Persuasive Communication

• Published in: Research in the teaching of English 1979-12, Vol.13 (4), p.293-316
• Main Authors: Rubin, Donald L., Piché, Gene L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age; Age groups; Developmental biology; English instruction; Intimacy; Post hoc; Statistical significance; Syntactics; Writing instruction; Written communication
• ISSN: 0034-527X; 1943-2348
• DOI: 10.58680/rte201117866

Students at grades 4, 8, & 12, & expert adults (N = 18 each) wrote messages intended to encourage glass recycling to 3 audiences arrayed along a dimension of intimacy to writer. Elicitation procedures were designed to stimulate sense of audience & to emphasize genuine persuasive purpose. A subsample engaged in an assessment of social cognitive skill wherein rationales for choices between alternative strategies were analyzed for depth of social inference. Scripts were examined for syntactic complexity & each finite predication was assigned to 1 of 35 appeal subtypes & 18 superordinate appeal categories. Results indicated that syntactic complexity was affected by age & by audience. A hypothesis relating perceived processing demands of syntax to interpersonal obligation is offered. Use of different strategies by different ages is outlined. Results strongly indicated that only 2 older groups used strategies differentially for the varying audiences, suggesting a developmental stylistics of writing in which adaptation to audience attributes is manifest both in formal linguistic structure & strategic content. Though social cognitive ability is presumed to mediate audience adaptation, the present study failed to confirm that dependency. Modified AA