W.CCR.4 — that's the 4th College and Career Readiness anchor standard within the Writing strand of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for ELA/Literacy — reads as follows:
Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
To me, W.CCR.4 is all about the brain of writing itself; it's about communicating effectively based on three primary considerations. If I had to simplify this anchor standard into a three-letter acronym, I would go with TAP.
Task, Audience, Purpose
![Task, Audience, Purpose, and the Common Core](https://davestuartjr.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/task_audience_purpose_common_core-300x125.png)
In any given piece of writing, the decisions that writers must make are dictated by task, audience, and purpose.
For example, consider how task influences a piece. Throughout their freshman year, my students will write many arguments in my class (see W.CCR.1); sometimes, these will be extended, multi-draft pieces of writing, and sometimes they will be timed writing assessments. Time is a part of task: if a student has several weeks to complete a multi-draft argument, I will expect clever organization and a polished style; if a student has thirty minutes to complete an argument (as is the case with ACT writing tests), I will expect a more predictable organization and a less developed style.
Audience is also a crucial consideration in any piece of writing. If I am writing an email to my boss, the style of the email will be considerably more formal than an email to my wife; if my students are writing a post to an online discussion forum with their classmates on Edmodo, I will expect different stylistic choices than I would in their thank you letters to people who make donations to our classroom. Similarly, when they are writing literary analyses that only myself and their peers will read, I will model an academic style for them to mimic and I will show them how to cite quotations in MLA format, whereas if they are composing a “letter to the editor”-style argument, we'll consider how a public audience differs from an academic one.
Finally, purpose is the third part of TAP, and it, too, is going to shape a piece of writing. When I occasionally query magazine editors about freelance article ideas, my purpose is to sell an idea, and this totally impacts my organization and style: I've got to be efficient in showing the value of my idea. Meanwhile, if I'm writing a proposal to my department for a new achievement measurement that I think we should use, I am going to choose evidence and language that I believe will be most compelling to them.
That's it
W.CCR.4 is pretty darn simple and powerful: teach students how to think through the implications of TAP. (<-Click here to tweet this quote.)
This way of thinking will help them with every piece of writing that they sit down to do for the rest of their lives: love letters, resumes, master's theses, time off requests, blog entries, or whatever else.
If you found this post useful and think others might, too, please tweet it!
Leave a Reply