Adapting a persuasive text for two audiences
Your class runs a campaign to reduce single-use plastic at a coastal town in Spain. You have written a 150-word persuasive text for teenagers that opens with '¿Sabes que cada año acaban en el mar millones de bolsas?' and uses imperatives ('¡Actúa ya!') and rhetorical questions. Your teacher now asks you to produce a second version, 150 words, for a town council meeting where attendees include shop owners and retirees. You must keep the same core proposal: a voluntary ban on plastic bags in local shops starting 1 September, with a six-month trial. You cannot simply copy the teenage version.
1. Explain three specific changes you would make to adapt the text for the council audience, and why each change suits the new purpose and audience.
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First, change the direct 'tú' address and imperatives to a more inclusive 'nosotros' or impersonal constructions. '¡Actúa ya!' presumes the reader is a consumer who can act individually; councillors and shop owners respond better to collective framing such as 'les proponemos' or 'podríamos acordar'. Second, replace rhetorical questions with evidence and concrete conditions. Teenagers respond to emotional hooks; a council audience wants feasibility: how the six-month trial will be monitored, what support shop owners receive, and what happens after the trial. Third, adjust lexis and tone: remove slang and exclamation marks, use terms such as 'comercio local', 'periodo de prueba' and 'participación voluntaria'. The core proposal stays identical; only framing changes. The reasoning tested is audience awareness: purpose (persuade a decision-making body), relationship (formal, collective) and channel (spoken statement at a meeting) all shape register and argument structure.
2. A classmate says the council version should keep the question '¿Sabes que cada año acaban en el mar millones de bolsas?' because it is memorable. Evaluate this advice.
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The advice is partly right but mostly wrong for this audience. The statistic is memorable and worth keeping, but the framing '¿Sabes que...?' directly addresses a single reader as 'tú', which is inappropriate in a formal statement to a council; it can sound patronising to people who already know the issue. Better to keep the fact and drop the question: 'Cada año acaban en el mar millones de bolsas, muchas procedentes de nuestro comercio local.' This preserves the striking number while localising it, which is more persuasive to shop owners and councillors because it connects the problem to their decisions. The general principle: retain content that works (concrete data), change the packaging that does not (direct address, rhetorical question format). Adapting a text means re-engineering the relationship with the reader, not just swapping words.