Your audience can change everything about your paper. It determines style, tone, content, and how you choose to approach your topic. Fulwiler gives some great suggestions for approaching a paper according to your audience.
When writing for teachers who assign narrow topic guidelines I usually have trouble writing well and producing something I’m proud of. Fulwiler gave me some really helpful tips on how to approach these kinds of situations, however, I’m not sure if they’re all possible. He suggests that you try and convince yourself a subject is interesting. While this technique will work for some, I find it hard to truly care about something I’m not interested in and even harder to fool myself into thinking it’s interesting.
I do like his suggestion of “trying a different slant.” When writing it’s really easy to get stuck in a rut and to use the same methods over and over again. While each writer tends to have a distinct style it isn’t necessary to sacrifice creativity for consistency. You can have a voice while still trying new ways of expressing your ideas. Regardless of the audience, variety is pleasant in writing.
A point Fulweiler made which I really agree with is to consider yourself an audience. You really have to be happy with what you’re writing to feel satisfied. it’s easy to write poorly, to write just to make the grade, but it doesn’t help the writer grow and evolve. If you never like what you write odds are you’ve never experienced your full potential, and without that experience you don’t know how far you can go.
2 comments:
Kirsten, I totally agree with you… the audience affects a large part of your writing. When I go to write a paper, I don’t necessarily think about my reader before I start to write, but I find myself somewhat subconsciously considering the audience while creating my paper. Personally, I think this is the best way to most clearly and effectively convey my point to the reader. Also, I can definitely see where you’re coming from in regards to Fulwiler’s advice to make yourself believe that a particular paper assignment is interesting. I have also found it hard to really get into a paper or assignment, when it is based on a topic that I do not particularly find interesting. I guess this advice works for some people though!
I really agree with your last paragraph but I always find my self writing to get the grade and not satisfy myself. Its just so much easier to push aside what I want and write for someone else. You are so right it doesn’t really help me at all it just gets the grade and doesn’t make me grow as a writer or evolve. I am going to have to step out of my habit of writing for the grade and start writing for myself as well. I am a source of audience time I start using myself as one.
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