Understanding your audience

Understanding who makes up your audience is fundamentally important for any writer or speaker. I was reminded of this today in an otherwise boring talk on a topic far from boring (Sherlock Holmes) because the speaker read, verbatim, to an audience of non-experts a lecture designed to be read by scholars. It was written to be published in a journal, not delivered orally.

This practice is all too common at academic conferences. Instead of talking in clear language, scholars generally write a paper that is really an article in disguise, full of long sentences and abstract language ("narrative strategies deeply informed by hermeneutics....") that seems designed to put people to sleep within fifteen minutes.

The speaker's problem today was that he had no idea to whom he was speaking. He wanted to sound impressive, I suppose, and ending up wasting our time, or at least mine.

The lesson is something I always consider in communication. I cannot write without deciding, Who will read this? Where can I send this (for publication)?  If I picture certain readers I know, or imagine someone like myself as the ideal reader, I have an audience, and the communication process works. I have a reason to write.

Without an audience of readers, I am lost as a writer, unable to do anything.

Consider this blog: Who is my audience? I get only hints since so few readers ever leave comments.  The fine people at Goog'e BlogSpot give me a tally by country of those who have clicked onto one of my posts, and I am amazed to find readers in China, Russia, Europe and the U.S. (rarely in Canada or Australia, for unknown reasons). 

Beyond location, I know nothing much about these readers except that certain topics elicit more attention than others. I have to imagine who they are since a writer's audience is always a fiction, as Walter Ong once wrote n a famous article.

Just knowing taht at least one or two people "out there" in cyberspace might read what I write gives me the motivation to communicate. So I remain grateful to Google for this service and to the presence of unseen readers who make possible what I do on Writing in the Spirit.

Are we cheapening our language?

Is the use of texting, tweeting, e-mailing, and blogging ruining the English language? The question is a recurring one in the media, and just recently I saw an editorial in the magazine N+1 posing the question: does writing on the internet and other electronic media cheapen our language?

The answer is yes, but in two senses: the good sense (writing is more available to all, with publication more democratic) and the bad (ease leads to carelessness and confusion). Bloggers, says the editorial, write off the top of their head and in the conversational rush produce sloppy prose. There is no time for revision.

If all online writing takes on the quality of blogs, it is said, to write well--indeed, to write anything--will seem "pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned."

Well, there's nothing like hyperbole to catch the reader's attention. The blogs I read do not seem especially careless, rushed, unedited nor do I see a connection between blogging and texting, tweeting, etc., though my exposure to these last two has been purposely minimal.

I confess that my posts on this blog are done under a self-imposed deadline and are less carefully revised than other writing I do for publication, but I naturally revise and edit everything, keeping in mind my admiration for interesting, original sentences, not to mention the demands I place on my writing students.

The 40-character limit of tweets limits itself to the trite and superfluous, at times, as when people chat about what they had for lunch (one respondent asking, why eat anything if you don't write about it?). Yet maybe the next Oscar Wilde, the next Dorothy Parker, masters of epigrammatic wit, are waiting to be born on Twitter. Who knows.

What concerns me is that young people reading and writing only condensed, abbreviated slangy chit-chat will assume that other forms of writing, including business e-mails and blogs, should be equally informal and so all their writing will take on the style approximating that of the late David Foster Wallace, which I would describe as controlled verbal chaos.

Writers often overlook the central role of reading as they shape sentences and choose words. And they forget that there is no writing without rewriting. My advice: read good stuff to counterbalance the tweets and always produce carefully revised prose when you write, no matter who your audience is, especially if your work is "out there" for the world to see.

Good writing will never be pretentious, elitist, or old-fashioned.