Heather Shearer
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
Many composition instructors ask students to read drafts aloud during writing workshops because doing so helps writers identify logical gaps, stylistic mishaps, or localized errors they overlook when reading drafts silently. To amplify the writerly knowledge gained from reading drafts aloud, we can extend the read-aloud practice through the final (polished) draft. The essence of the assignment is this: ask students to record themselves reading a polished draft and submit the audio recording along with the written version. The result is a basic version of what we commonly see online—a written text accompanied by a “click to listen” audio recording. This is not meant to be a complex multimodal assignment. Rather, it’s a fairly simple add-on that enhances existing writing assignments. Preparing an audio recording that is submitted alongside a finalized written draft carries with it all the revision-based benefits of reading aloud during workshops, but enriches those benefits by turning writers’ attention more seriously to rhetorical matters of arrangement, style, audience, and delivery. Writers find cause to revise and edit for readers’ eyes and ears, resulting in more readable and engaging prose. The benefits seem to come more easily when students are encouraged to develop a relationship with readers built on ethical considerations (Duffy) and empathy (Shearer), and when the written texts and recordings are made available to readers beyond the instructor (via the course LMS, for example). This assignment unites considerations of rhetoric with those of accessibility. Attention should be paid not only to how things are said (delivery) but to what is voiced. For instance, should footnotes be given airtime? How should visuals should be treated when creating a recording of a written text (Donegan 117-20)? In considering these issues, students are drawn into important conversations about text construction and text delivery for which there are no set standards.