A Little Thought Goes a Long Way

The obvious audience for college level writing would be a student's professors, administrators, and peers. Throughout my entire college experience the one element that has been consistently lacking in my own and my peer's writing was an adequate level of thought and time spent. It's likely that professors expect that the student puts in at least the same amount of time that he/she puts in. As a peer, there have been many times where I either felt ashamed of the fact that I was forcing my poorly written work onto other students, or times where I was frustrated by the lack of effort on the part of other students. It all boils down to time spent. If a student writes a paper for instance, and submits it without rereading it, then the audience then has to deal with tons of errors and is much less likely to appreciate the paper. If the same student takes the exact same paper, but instead of submitting it right away decides to take five minutes to read it, then they will have found a multitude of errors which can then be corrected and will no longer distract the reader from the core of what was written.

Tons of other groups are included in the audience for college writing. Companies, Grant Funders, Graduate programs, and even beyond that there are people who are affect by college writing whether it be fully developed or not. I think in this particular scenario the most fitting answer (although untrue) would be, "Practice makes perfect." The only way to guarantee that a writer meets the expectations of his/her audience is to just keep writing and to receive as much feedback as possible from positive and knowledgeable sources until writing becomes a honed skill and habit.