Teacher Notes on Description-Writing Exercises

Extended Case 8: Comparing Web Sites (Audience)

Goal:
To help students explore an important, real-world aspect of nonfiction writing, especially writing about science, that is almost completely neglected in high-school English classes: audience. The topic of this case is public-health biology, specifically the Escherichia coli O157:H7 bacterial strain featured as a food contaminant in Eric Schlosser's best-selling Fast Food Nation (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002). A revealing comparative opportunity is provided by three alternative web sites that all discuss E. coli, but for three different audiences (all are published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)).
Strategy:
ROLE OF AUTHENTIC AUDIENCE:
In school, most students learn to write for an audience of exactly one person, their teacher. Likewise, "meeting audience needs" in school usually means figuring out how satisfy their teacher's personal expectations for adequate writing.

In life beyond school, however, the audience for nonfiction writing is always a major concern for every responsible writer. Usually the audience consists of real people with real problems (health, legal, engineering, etc.) who are reading with the hope that the writer will help them solve those problems. The good-description guidelines highlight the information needs of such a real audience:

Teachers can generate many lessons from this case that show students the importance of this new (to them) aspect of nonfiction writing. Such audience comparisons introduce the responsibilities that "helping your audience" impose on those who write for the real world.

WEB SITE COMPARISON.
As a public health service, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) publish web sites that describe numerous pathogens. For E. coli O157:H7, the CDC actually offers three different versions. These biology-oriented, technical writing pages overlap about 80% in content, but they appear very different because each is tailored to a different audience. Students can learn much about audience appropriateness if you have them find, list, analyze, or explain some or all of the differences noted in the table below (which compares the two English-language versions; the next subsection covers the Spanish version separately). After exploring the audience-driven features of one or both (English) versions from CDC, you can also ask students to generate yet another version for yet another audience (such as a poster for the bathroom door of a day-care center).

Features "Technical" E. coli
CDC web site		 "General" E. coli
CDC web site
Identifying URL
(details below)		 .../escherichiacoli_t.htm .../escherichiacoli_g.htm
Intended Audience Health care professionals: physicians, nurses, etc. Concerned members of the public: fast-food restaurant workers, day-care providers, parents
Vocabulary Academic, specialized, science-based:
etiologic,
Gram-negative,
hemolytic uremic syndrome 		Familiar, nonspecialist, broadly understood:
causal,
disease-causing,
blood in the urine
Style Terse, very concise, to help the hurried doctor Verbose, conversational, expanded with explanations
Headings Technical terms Popular questions
Sections 30-50 words, tightly focused by topic 100-300 words, losely focused by question
Total size 92 lines, 444 words 170 lines, 1352 words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SPANISH-LANGUAGE VERSION.
Besides the "technical" and "general" discussions of E. coli compared above, CDC publishes a third treatment of the same topic in Spanish (escherichiacoli_g_sp.htm). This offers students even more opportunities to explore audience appropriateness.

(1) Style.
The Spanish version is structured and styled like the general, not the technical, English version. For example, it uses the same eight questions in the same order to organize the text. Students could be asked to add a third column to the table above to spell out the audience-oriented features of this Spanish-language web site.
(2) Appropriateness.
Spanish-speaking students might want to discuss (with classmates) how well this treatment meets the needs of those likely to read it in Spanish. What about the needs of those who only speak Spanish but cannot read it?
(3) Size.
The Spanish-language version is about 20% longer than the general English-language version. Professional translators know that some languages usually take more space than others to cover comparable content, and the standard estimate is that extended Spanish text will be 117% the size of its English counterpart (Guide to Translation and Localization, Portland, OR: Lingo Systems, 2004, p. 35). Students can discuss the implications of this for fitting technical text into places with tight size constraints (such as package labels or help cards).
(4) Idioms.
The general English version contains many common idioms (nonliteral expressions) for which a Spanish counterpart was needed (equivalent in meaning but not in wording). Examples include: 
          person-to-person
          toilet training
          intensive care
The challenge that such idioms pose for making "international" technical text universally understandable (especially in health-care situations like this one) is another interesting topic to raise with students.
Case:
The three versions of the CDC E. coli web site are available at the URLs listed here:
Contact: T.R. Girill trg@llnl.gov