Exercise 1-1A: Audience Expectations

Some readers and novice writers might assume the writing in that one discipline, such as  the natural sciences, might be inherently “dry” while another other, like the humanities, is “flowery.” Unfortunately, dull prose and flowery language both constitute bad writing. Ideally, your writing will be crisp and effective regardless of discipline or genre.

For this exercise, take a close look at the following sample sentences from different genres. For each sentence, choose the matching genre.. Use the word bank to select the appropriate genres (not all genres in word bank will be used).

Word Bank: scholarly article: natural science, video game review, news article, poem, short story, TV commercial transcript, scholarly article: humanities, descriptive lab report

For an editable Google doc of this exercise that you can download, click here.