My Nebulous Audience

As a former teacher of writing for 14 years, I know well the importance of knowing your audience before writing something. I used to stress with students, "You can't possibly begin a piece, even do your pre-writing activities, if you don't know who you're writing to!" For instance, if you were writing a piece about particle physics, you would write very simplistically if you were writing a children's book (How many children's books are about particle physics? Dumb example.), you would be a little more complex if you were writing in a high school physics book, and even more detailed if you were writing a journal article for other particle physicists. If you were writing a light piece for People magazine you'd write an even different piece. Audience is a HUGE variable.

Which is a real problem for me, because I've never really been sure who my audience was when I was writing this blog (That's the nature of posting things wide open for everyone on the Internet), and my intended audience has shifted around over time. When I first started writing this blog, my intended audience was literally NO ONE! I was just checking out the jottit.com website (and later the blogger.com website that I'm currently using) so that if teachers asked about where to blog I could offer them some suggestions. My first posts show my lack of audience. They're basically about nothing (Not that I work real hard on a daily basis to avoid that now!) and were not a whole lot more than words just sort of stuck together. I think the first entry that had any kind of substance was my entry about buying a guitar (I'll give you an update on that soon).

So the audience started as no one, but once I redirected the sweasy.net domain to point to this site then my family members started reading it, and at that point my intended audience shifted. I began writing with the idea in the back of my mind that--if no one else was reading what I wrote--my mom and dad probably were. So my family became my intended audience.



Then I began to have people I knew but I'd never told about the site stop me and tell me they'd really enjoyed what I'd written about the Presidential race or about what I'd written about Sally Field. "You've seen my site?" I'd ask suspiciously. "Yeah," they'd say. "Found it on the Internet." At about the same time I had a couple of anonymous comments placed on the site, and at least one was from someone I'd never met AT ALL! And I suddenly realized that--by allowing blogger to index my site--it could be found and read by an even larger audience. This didn't really impact what I was writing, but it did make me feel like someone was looking over my shoulder. And I guess though it hasn't changed the tone of what I've written, it has changed the subject. There are things going on in my life that I wouldn't post on here because I wouldn't want it to get back to someone that I had written it. But again, I'm not sure I would have posted those things for my mom and dad to see, either!

Over the last couple of days, though, I've become aware of something that HAS changed what I've written on the site. Some of my children's friends are reading my blog and commenting on what they're finding there. They began by commenting on Choco's Blog, which is fine. I created that blog as a silly site, a way of making sure that the memory of Choco (which is the name of the now seven year old imaginary monster that I have pretended to be over the years with my kids) lived on after my children got tired of him. I didn't mind at all that my girls' friends (some of whom have played with Choco before, too) were visiting this page.

But to get to that page, my kids were telling them to just go to sweasy.net. Why not? It's easy to remember, and I have the link to Choco's page running down the right side of the page. It's convenient!

Except that some of the kids' friends are now reading this blog, too, and that changes everything. In fact, I had to make a change to the blog entry that I wrote a couple of days ago. One sentence in that entry as it currently appear reads as follows: "No one ever says, 'Well, thank God Mary was abused repeatedly for six years as a child and now has schizophrenia--she's a much stronger person as a result!'" The original text of this blog entry used much stronger language in place of "abused," but after realizing that some preteens were reading the site I thought, "I can't write that! I have to put in something else!"

Lisa suggested that I change the whole thing to read, "Thank God Mary was hit with a pie in the face repeatedly for six years as a child and now has bad acne," but I felt that sort of took away from the point I was trying to make, so I settled for "abused." It works, but I don't think it's as effective as what I was planning to use.

Part of the problem may be with the title of the site: "Sweasy.net, Home of all things Sweasy." There's really no way that this site can be a portal for everything related to the Sweasy family. I put that up there because at one point I was considering the idea of encouraging ALL of my brothers and sisters to join blogger and then I'd give them rights to this blog and we could ALL add pictures, news, and opinions to the site. But then I changed my mind for two reasons: 1) I rarely see my family and thus do not have time to help them get set up with blogger and using the site, and 2) I became protective of the site as I added content and didn't want others messing around with it.

I might need to create an additional blog, a sweasy.net portal for family pictures and things, and then a personal portal for me to just write about what I want to write about. But I have a couple of problems with that: 1) I don't want to become a guy with a bunch of blogs to update and maintain. I already have two, and I don't want a third. 2)I'd probably want to put a link to that personal blog on the family blog, and that would just put me back where I am now. It would be a little harder for friends of my children to find the site, but they could still find it.

So this is a long blog entry, and the whole point of it is to say that I'm really not sure what it is I want to do with this site, and that's because I really don't know what the audience for the site is.

Great. Here's another example of a teacher not minding his own instruction!