My Thesis? Um...

I honestly have no idea what my thesis for the article-length essay due at midnight this Sunday will be. I’m struggling to formulate a thesis that incorporates audience awareness and how literature classes at the high school and middle school levels do not have audience awareness. How am I supposed to write that? How am I supposed to support that? This is going to be a nightmare.

I was recently sucked into the black hole that is Girl Meets World, a Disney Channel sequel to the ever-popular Boy Meets World. GMW focuses on the adventures and coming of age story of Corey and Topanga’s (the stars of Boy Meets World) middle school aged daughter Riley Matthews. It’s a little silly, a lot of fun, and deals with many of the issues young teens face but the episode that really caught my attention was “Girl Meets the New Teacher.” This episode focuses on the conflict between Riley’s new English teacher and the school’s principal. The new English teacher, named Harper Lee (I’m sure you can guess the literary reference), wants to use comic books as part of her syllabus, specifically The Dark Knight, and the principal is having none of it. (Spoiler Alert) In the end Harper wins the debate when she proves that The Dark Knight has valid life lessons that can be applied to everyday life—and that connect to To Kill a Mockingbird, the book the principal wanted her to teach in the first place.

 In this example, the teacher understood her audience. When told to read a comic book everyone in the class, even Maya, Riley’s academically lazy and uninterested best friend, jumps to complete the assignment. Of course, this is a fictional scenario invented by script writers for a TV show that always has a happy ending—or is it? Audience Awareness is an important part of composition, of anything really. Knowing who your audience is and what they want is a crucial part of effectively reaching them so you can make your point or persuade them to do something. I mentioned in last week’s blog post that video game developers don’t know their audience. If I can somehow figure out what my thesis is I intend to include references to "UK Games: More Women Play Games Than Men, Report Finds" and "Video Games Need More Women - And Asking For That Won't End the World". Both of these articles discuss the disparity between what video game designers develop and what the majority of their customers actually want and how that is hurting them in the long run. I hope to somehow connect this to Ross Collin’s “How Rhetorical Theories of Genre Address Common Core Writing Standards” and Carol Berkenkotter’s “Understanding a Writer's Awareness of Audience.” 

I’m not sure if this is what Dr. Rice intended when he assigned us to “Compose an article-length essay with at least 10 sources on a composition teaching and/or research topic” but this is what I have and this is what interests me. The best teachers I had were the ones who could make the subject relatable and interesting which, in my English classes, was exceptionally hard to do, restricted as those teachers were by syllabi that permitted them to only teach the classics.