Threshold Concepts of Writing: The Audience

When it came time to choose a threshold concept to present for class, I skimmed briefly through the table of contents, trying to see if there would be anything to grab my attention. And almost immediately the chapter entitled “Writing Addresses, Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences” caught my idea. The idea of writing “creating an audience,” sounded pretty crazy to me. Just the very idea of “creating an audience,” seemed really abstract, and kind of cool. I was intrigued, so I figured that should be my threshold concept. I’m a sucker for good titles. From articles to books, anything that has a good title immediately grabs me. Last semester for one of my English classes we were assigned “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” It was one of the last books on the syllabus, and for the whole semester I was excited to read it. It just seemed so mysterious, like it was inviting closer inspection. It ended up being one of my favorite reads to date, for other reasons than the title. To cap off my rambling, I have an easier time getting into things that have good titles. Who says you can’t judge a book by its cover?

But what does it really mean though to “create an audience?”

That’s up for debate for sure, but what this piece tries to argue, is that whenever we write, we are writing for someone, or something. An assignment is for a teacher, an email is for coworkers. Even journal entries are for someone, in my opinion, that someone can be yourself. So therefore, all writing has an audience, and when we write, we in a sense get to “create” that audience.

Acknowledging that there are so many different ways to write, and so many different mediums, we quickly see how the possibility for writing becomes almost endless in this day and age. This means that more and more people than ever are able to write and share their ideas. They are able to engage in this process of create audiences in new and exciting ways.

This idea personally resonates with me because I’m a huge proponent of advocating for writers to find their own voices and think outside the box when they write. In fact, I get to do that pretty frequently at the Writing Center here at St. John’s. Working at the Writing Center, one of the philosophies that we preach is that want to help students and individuals to realize that anyone has the agency to write. We are in an age where thankfully, more and more people are able to get their voices heard than ever before in a very public way. Blogs, social media, forums. The internet has been a great blessing for allowing people to share writing, to connect with others in meaningful ways, to exchange ideas.

In many ways, it’s also been a curse.

My friend at Adelphi University wrote a paper on the effects of groupthink on social media sites and internet forums, particularly the site Reddit. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the paper to talk about it in more detail, but the main argument of his paper was that on sites like Reddit, where comments and replies are able to be “voted” on by other users, pushing them further to the top of a thread, it may lead groupthink amongst users. This had led to a lot of forums on Reddit in particular concealing the upvote or downvote counter from the viewers, in an attempt to create a less biased experience. The fact still remains that groupthink is a power way for misinformation to be spread, and for biased/hate speech to run rampant. Even comments and responses are writing, and we are authors when we respond. Its yet another opportunity for us to be thinking about audience and take that into consideration as we write.

In this day and age, we also might not have the opportunity to fashion our audiences exactly how we want them to be, in the sense that at least on the internet, practically anyone can read what you write. While we might not get a choice in who exactly reads what we write today, we still have control over consciously thinking about audience in our writing process, and letting those considerations shape our intentions as we write.

The point of it all at least to me is this: we have more tools and opportunities than ever before to write, and to have our writing be seen by the world. It’s remarkable, and I wouldn’t want to be alive in any other time than now. But with great power comes great responsibility. We need to be more conscious than ever when we write, and choose to write responsibly, to always be thinking about audience and to understand that our audiences now more than ever will be a much more diverse body of individuals. We must consciously choose to interact with them in meaningful ways and fulfill our obligation to be good authors.