My Take on Writing to an Audience

I think as a writer, having an audience is important, because it helps shape ideas and helps you provide your ideas to others so when I think about when I write, I do imagine an audience but it fluctuates. When I’m free writing or writing for my blog, I have ventured into the idea of writing what's on my mind or what I feel would be something my high school self would need to hear. But when it comes to academic writing, I have realized that I like to imagine that I’m educating someone on the topic that I’m writing about or I’m writing to a specific scholar in that field or my professor. In high school, I had always had a broad sense of my audience so I think that was what hindered my writing because I was writing for basically everyone. And like Le Peau said in his book, Write Better, “A book that is for everyone is for no one”(pg 25). So after reading the articles for this week, I have found myself to agree with the ideas that were brought up within them that the first draft should be free writing and the second draft should be narrowed as you consider your audience. I think this is really good advice because freewriting allows me to explore all the ideas I want without thinking that it's not worth it for my audience because maybe it will become my strongest point or topic. Allowing freewriting helps explore the rabbit holes of ideas in your mind and it puts it on a page so you can scratch it out or even dig deeper if you found yourself to be compelled by the subject. I think that Audience, in that case, can cause you to do worse work than you want because you are structuring your mind to someone else when you already have a unique brain with unique ideas that you can bring to the table. Overall, I think that the audience is important for a writer to thrive, but it shouldn’t be the first thing on a writers mind.