Writing Teacher Meets Mid-December

The semester starts to wind down, and my energy for writing gets subsumed by the papers that need comments, or the students who need tutoring, or the project that is due in 3 days. It's always like this.

So I took a minute to reflect on what I'd been writing in this space, and determined that the answer is "whatever." I have friends who write, and whose public writing spaces are focused, with a dedication to following a particular topic, idea or sequence. There is a gestalt to their body of work, and I have a bit of envy about that cohesion.


I, on the other hand, write about whatever has captured my interest at a given momennt. This is probably why I've always known better than to pursue a life as a real writer-who-(hopefully) gets-paid. I don't have the grim determination, focus or interest in pursuing a longer text, or a series of shorter texts that tilt on a particular theme. No, I like to write about whatever. What's more, or maybe worse, is that I rarely do more than a minimal proof-reading of the work prior to posting it. There have been a few exceptions-if I find I've stumbled on something that compels me to keep going, I will. Mostly, however, I don't.

All of that said, I find that blogging (or non-profit public writing as I tend to think of it) brings up interesting questions about audience. As a writing teacher, I spend buckets of time discussing audience. In an academic setting, that's pretty easy--the audience is either me, their peers, or some arbitrary audience I've named in the rhetorical situation of the assignment. Real-life, non-profit public writing (can we just call it RLNPW?) blows the assumption that audience is easily named right out of the proverbial water. According to google analytics, folks from such diverse places as Russia and the Netherlands find their way to this particular place on the web. (I have confusion about the why of this, but no matter.)

This idea of an audience beyond the classroom is suddenly of interest to me because, for next semester, I'm planning to require my first year writing students to practice RLNPW. Whom shall I tell them is reading, I wonder. I will, of course, and their peers. But we, potentially, are a very small percentage of the audience for that work.

What I'm curious about is this: how will the potential of a larger, anonymous, audience change the tenor of typical FYW journals? Or will it? It has been assumed by many academics that our milennials, so accustomed to a life fully lived on the public stage, are unable to see the value of the private. I know what my students' journals look like now; I'm curious to see what they look like at the end of May.

And I, as a participant, will continue doing what I do best--writing about whatever nonsense flits across my my mind. Enjoy (she says, quite tongue-in-cheekily).