The Writing Audience

You've proofread. You've recited in front of a mirror. You've practiced your pace. You've incorporated hand gestures and body language. You know the speech. You know your material. You have done everything possible to present a compelling speech. You approach the podium, look out at the audience, and begin. But this is not going how you expected. You're making mistakes, you're awkward, you're fumbling, you're frozen.

Most of us can think of a time when something very similar to this story happened to us. If formal presentations, whether they be a speech or a paper, are supposed to based on how well prepared you are and how well you can discuss the subject, why do we freeze at the podium? Why do we freeze at the keyboard?

Writing Centers and Writing Consultants spend a lot of time exploring how to make better writers, but it seems that there are more avenues to that goal than examining the words themselves. A student may be a perfectly capable writer when writing a private message to a friend, but not when they have to turn in a paper. Another student may write a brilliant letter for a scholarship application, but write poorly when they have to email their parents.

In casual conversation, people rarely "freeze". There is a fluid dynamic that allows communication to continue rather effortlessly (aside from intensely awkward situations). As Mr. Carleton noted in class today, once these words are written on paper or recorded on a tape, a layer of permanence is attached to them. Your words can be presented without you being there. Your words can be received by audiences you don't know, audiences you're comfortable with, audiences you're uncomfortable with.

Writing Consultants need to be aware of the context that a writing sample is done under. Maybe the student is nervous writing for a strict academic professor and so attempts to use language or styles that they do not like or cannot adequately employ. Maybe the student is on friendly terms with their professor and are tempted to use overly casual language in an analytic paper. In whichever direction the issue presents itself, the relationship between the writer and anticipated audience can have far reaching consequences on the writing.

To help a student become a better writer, we must keep in mind the other factors that contribute to sophisticated writing, and psychological or social pressures imposed by the presence of an audience are one of those key factors.