Audience reflects Voice

I am the type of writer who likes to pretend that I write for myself, and my thoughts are independent of any filter or bias created by my audience. However, I would be lying if I said that anything I wrote for the public eye had the same voice of my private journal. The truth of the matter is, if a writer is writing for their work to be read by other people, their writing is going to be shifted in order to appease that particular audience. The writer can write on the same topic multiple times for multiple different audiences and the piece is going to differ according to who the writer was writing for.

I love my personal journal, and my writing in my journal encompasses my most raw, personal and private thoughts, and it is in those thoughts that allowed me to fall in love with writing in the first place. I wish that audience didn't play a role in the work that the writer creates, but it is a consequence of the society we live in.

I have done a lot of thinking about audience and the audience's perception of work as it pertains to my Senior Seminar project. Throughout my years at Transy, my writing has been driven by my emotions and experiences deriving from my drastic culture shock coming from Southern California, to a very southern culture in Kentucky. I have written about my feelings a lot in multiple different contexts, and each work differed from one another because I wrote it with a different audience in mind. My very first piece was a blog post on my personal blog that I felt no one read. However, to my surprise it actually got a lot of reads and I had said things in my post that I believed but didn't want my peers to know. I would have written that blog post a lot differently had I known it would have been read as widely as it was.

I built upon that post, and wrote an OP-ED piece in the Transylvania Newspaper a year later. This time, I attempted to write in a much more dignified manner and backed up my claims with examples to give my experiences relevance to the reader. I wrote it thinking about the readers this time. My audience was similar, but I had another year of experience under my belt and this time, I was prepared for my opinions to be read. This experience created a very filtered version of the same opinions I had already written about.

I compare these two articles and I can see a difference in my voice. I feel like I played it safe in the Rambler article because I was aware of the audience backlash of disagreeing with my opinion. When it comes to audience, for me, I think it is something we need to strive to work beyond. I want to write a strong, compelling argument for something, and not worry about the repercussions. I don't want my audience to filter my writing. I want an audience to develop a conversation about a piece of writing, as that is their purpose to begin with, but a writer needs to keep in mind that good conversation from the audience only occurs if the writer is genuine with their thoughts and doesn't play it safe for the audience's sake.