Audience Paired with Writing

After reading this article and completing the first draft of my self-analysis project, I can definitely attest to the idea that audience influences the way you write. When you look at the purpose of writing, it’s clear that someone will be reading that piece of writing someday. Even if no one does and you’re the one that revisits that piece of writing, you’ve just written something for an audience. So really, there’s no such thing as writing with no audience; even when you journal.

How does audience affect your writing, though? I’m going to use the journal style to try to explain my thinking on that. When I write in my journal, it’s typically about private things that I need to get off of my chest but don’t want to tell anyone about. If that’s the case, then it would seem as if I’m writing without an audience in mind. Yet, when I write in my journal, I find that I am actually formatting my entries to not be too revealing or have something that I wouldn’t want someone else to read later because even though this journal is private and I wouldn’t willingly show it to anyone, the fact is that eventually I will not be around to safe guard it and someone will read it one day. Whether that be future generations of my family, a random stranger, etc., someone will read that journal; hence an audience.

So even my private journal can’t be private because I know that eventually someone will read it. That goes for everything that goes down on paper or onto a document. It might be difficult to find or access, but someone will be reading it. Think of Shakespeare or the even the Bible. Those are two examples of ancient text that still exists today, and people are reading it, interpreting, and revolving their lives around it. An audience extends far further than many might think and so it definitely will affect how you write; whether that be the style of your writing, the content of your writing, or even the quantity of your writing.

This definitely shows in the documents that I analyzed for my project. Each paper had a different audience and you could see that in my tone, length, etc. It also affected how much time I put into each assignment. The website took longer than the essays because it was something many other people might use so I wanted it to be the best that it could be. The essays were for a grade, yet I wanted to impress the professor, so my style and organization changed. Audience has everything to do with writing because that is why we write: for other people to read it.