Brochures: Writing for Audience and Purpose

This brochure assignment follows another writing assignment, giving students the opportunity to see how shifting purposes and audiences creates changes in their strategies as writers—in the stance they take, in the information they use or leave out, and in the processes they follow to complete the task. After exploring published brochures, students determine key questions about their previously-used topic by first generating their own questions and then asking others what they would want to know. They then research the topic to find answers to three key questions. Finally, they work through the writing process to create their own informative brochure which incorporates visual elements as part of the informative communication. During the process, they re-examine sample brochures, looking for the types of texts included and how the text is laid out on the page.

Featured Resources

Brochure Inquiry: This handout guides students in considering questions related to their topic and then asking others to suggest important questions, as well.

Evaluative Reading: This handout gives students specific guidance in peer reviewing a classmate's brochure.

Printing Press: Students can use this online tool to create brochures, flyers, booklets, and newspapers.

From Theory to Practice

In the book, Strategic Writing, Deborah Dean explains this brochure lesson as a way to help students understand that writing for differing purposes and audiences may require using different genres, different information, and different strategies. Developing a sense of audience and purpose in writing, in all communication, is an important part of growth as a writer. Shifting from one genre with its incumbent audience and purpose to another, builds sensitivity to these factors in students. Additionally, today's students are confronted by a variety of texts that integrate verbal and visual materials to create a unified message. Creating a text that combines verbal and visual elements can develop students' ability to navigate increasingly complex uses of text types in their world, especially their world online.

Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 1. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
• 3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).
• 4. Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
• 5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
• 6. Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.
• 7. Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.
• 8. Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.

Materials and Technology

A collection of informative brochures