ABSTRACT
Students need to learn how to make language choices depending on the intended audience and the voice or identity they want to reveal through their writing. As they develop, they also need to consider the position of others when they state their own. Students show awareness of audience by their language choices and by fully developing the topic in a way that will be understood by the audience. There are a number of grammatical features that help establish the voice in a piece, making the writing authoritative, entertaining, respectful, or friendly. Those grammatical structures are mood or type of sentences (statements, questions, commands, and exclamations), grammatical person (first, second, and third), modality (for example, must, will, might), explicit expressions of attitude (pretty, ugly), graduation or turning up or down the intensity of the attitude (gigantic, tiny), and implicit expressions of attitude (the performance turned me off). As students reach the middle school years (ages 11/12 to 13/14), they need to learn to state their position on what they are writing about, considering other positions. Their choice of language may allow for other opinions or may close the door to other opinions. In addition, when they state the position of others, they need to learn how to introduce it to reflect their own stance, positive or negative, toward others’ point of views or present them in such a way that their stance is neutral or indecisive.
This chapter describes these various aspects of language, illustrates the challenges students have, and suggests lessons to address these challenges.
