Writing 200 Blog Post 3 - Audience

You’ve read several writers who are exploring the role of the audience in writing. What do you think? In your own writing, what considerations have you made for the audience and how has that shaped what you’ve written? Feel free to provide specific examples from your writing, as well as relying on the essays you’ve read this week.

This week of readings has been interesting for me because, though I've obviously heard about how writers should consider our audience, I've never put much thought into it. For me, writing is much more a work of poesis, as Elbow writes, than an act of communication. I certainly shape that poesis to the constraints of an assignment or a professor's stylistic preferences in an academic setting, but in my other writing—even journalism, which on reflection should involve a decent amount of audience analysis—I've never intentionally bent my content or even my style to anything more than a general reader (for example, editing for clarity and to define terms people may not know.)

This week will definitely make me reconsider this gap in my writing process. The perspective I like the most of those we've read is Steinbeck's advice to write for an audience of one person who shares the characteristics of those you want to reach. It seems to me that this practice could add another layer of individuality to the writing and deepen the connection to readers by being personal, not shaped to the whims of a generic audience. I know that one element of strong writing I lack is a distinctive voice—I think so, at least—so this way of thinking about audience could remedy that somewhat. And whatever advice Steinbeck is giving, I'll listen to—he's written some of the most striking words I've ever read.

If I do incorporate any level of audience analysis, though, I want to be sure that it doesn't take over my writing, I do still see writing primarily as an outlet of creative and communicative energies that should reflect the individual writer more than anyone else. And frankly, I don't write for an audience the majority of the time (in long-form writing, that is, not counting emails and other written communication.) I want to keep the benefits and advantages of treating writing as an act of creation first and foremost, and then consider how I can relay that creation to readers.