The Fictionalized Reader: Audiences for High-School Writers of Research Papers.

High school students writing research papers face the problem of finding audiences for their work, especially today when the consensus is that any kind of good writing requires some hypothetical audience or reader. Unless students are in a composition class where they write to someone special, they have difficulty grasping the idea of audience. Discussing the opening lines of Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" helps students grasp the idea that Hemingway creates his readers along with his story. To make the transition from Hemingway's fiction to their own research projects, students need to study contemporary nonfiction to see how these writers create audiences. Choices abound for good nonfiction, among them John Madson's "Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie," or"Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art" and "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century," by Barbara Tuchman. For other students, audiences can be created through the use of "The Journal of Popular Culture." Students can assume they are writing their paper to be "published." By finding an appropriate audience, students can write lively, informative papers. (HOD)