On Strengthening Chinese College Students’ Audience Awareness to Improve Their Persuasive Writing Ability

Persuasive or argumentative writing, which focuses on the reader and seeks to change the reader’s mind, or to bring the reader’s point of view to the writer’s, is the most prominent and practical academic writing and is also the most complex and most challenging. To achieve the persuasive purpose, audience is a key element to consider. But unfortunately, many Chinese college students have no sense of audience at all. Besides, although some researchers have mentioned in their books or papers the important role the audience plays in persuasive writing, so far few writing books or papers have made a relatively comprehensive and systematic study and exploration of how to strengthen Chinese college students’ audience awareness. So, this paper, which is intended to elaborate on it, first gives a definition to audience awareness, then analyzes the influence audience awareness exerts on persuasive writing, and finally proposes a few feasible and effective methods to strengthen Chinese college students’ audience awareness.

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