As I am attempting to narrow my focus for my final paper, most of my reading responses will be to topics relating to my area of interest in composition: specifically the idea of audience and how it is changing for fiction and non-fiction writers in a world that is becoming increasingly more “connected” and yet more isolated all at once. I think interesting comparisons could be drawn to Brandt’s essay “Remembering Reading, Remembering Writing” in regards to personal, nonacademic writing. I think a lot has changed in this realm of composition, especially the increase in popularity of online journals (where the idea of privacy is almost laughable) and the use of social networking sites like Facebook to express intensely personal thoughts.
Ong’s article on the audience as a fiction is also very interesting to me as I attempt to explore how the idea of an audience is changing. For example, who do the authors of online journals see as their audience? Do they see it as a truly personal medium, or is the allure in the faceless readers who can anonymously comment. To go past Ong’s argument, I think it can be contended that authors of online content can often not only fictionalize and frame their audience, they often have a hand in shaping them (with such a wide variety of reading material online, it seems that an online journal readership would be comprised mostly of people of similar demeanors, personalities, and problems), adding another dimension of isolation to the medium. Elbow’s ideas on “ignoring the audience” essentially non-applicable, in a format where you can get a personal response within minutes of typing the last word.
Another topic I think would be interesting to address (and the point I thought was most lacking from Bruffee’s article on collaborative learning) is the disparity in ideas of audience between introverted and extroverted writers. While composition theorists seem to want to overlook the minutia of character that can so drastically shape a composition style, I think it is crucial to address within the context of collaborative learning and writing. In Bruffee’s example, it seems almost ignorant to ignore the fact that there are people who simply prefer to work alone, and create better in isolation due to simply being more content than when they work with others. In the world of new media and social networking, it would seem logical that an introverted person would react far differently than an extrovert to these new forms of composition, which feature a vast potential audience of strangers and friends, as well as the potential for immediate feedback, criticism and/or praise. I would also be interested as to how personality type informs what kind of writing a person likes to do, it seems to me through my collegiate career that the people who have a propensity for journalism and nonfiction have strikingly different demeanors than those who compose sonnets or write short stories. I would think personality type, as well as style preference, would inform a lot about how a writer perceives his or her audience.
I don’t really take much stock in the articles which attempt to outline composition in a formulaic way, and I think most all of the research and surveying for my paper will have to be qualitative in nature. While articles like “Writing as a Mode of Learning” and serve as a good foundation for composition theory, the ideas I’m looking at deal with composition and learning on a realm that the authors of these articles couldn’t even imagine. Janet Emig would have had no way to forsee the phenomenon of Facebook, though it is interesting to imagine how the idea of status updates would have tied in with her “languaging processes.” The idea of revision, as outlined extensively in the article by Sommers is almost nonexistent in the world of digital composition, where you can tweet faster than you can spellcheck, and That said, articles like these provide the history of composition, while my paper will attempt to explain the differences in composition today, and potentially how the field will continue to move forward.
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Meredith,
ReplyDelete>who do the authors of online journals see as their audience? Do they see it as a truly personal medium, or is the allure in the faceless readers who can anonymously comment.
I have a tumblr and I've consistently posted on it for about a year now. I hadn't really kept an online journal before, and when I started out, I was sort of naive... I didn't know what to expect in terms of audience. My posts were long and involved. I was really striving to express myself. Now that I have followers, all being people I know in real life, my posts have become shorter, with a lot less writing, more pictures/videos/etc. I still write, but it's nowhere near the extent to which I started out, and this change came about once I became familiar with an audience. Once I knew exactly who had access to what I was writing, I became less willing to share so much of myself. I wonder about this. I realized what I was writing was actually being read, and I started censoring myself. Ignoring the audience, in this sense, is pretty impossible.
On another note, I think it's interesting you bring up how introverts' and extroverts' preferences in learning differ. I understand what you mean when you say that collaborative learning may make introverts' creative processes more difficult, but I also think collaborative learning is of benefit regardless. Take work shopping for example. If writing is to be our career, we have to get used to the idea of audience, and nothing's more convincing on the existence of a reader than people dissecting your writing in front of you.
“I would also be interested as to how personality type informs what kind of writing a person likes to do, it seems to me through my collegiate career that the people who have a propensity for journalism and nonfiction have strikingly different demeanors than those who compose sonnets or write short stories.” This sentence in your thought paper jumped out at me. I think for a final paper this would be a very interesting topic, how personality plays into the writing one produces. It makes a lot of sense, I think of my friends who write poetry and those who are journalism majors; there is a definite contrast in personality. I never thought of how that would affect someone’s writing. Do you think people with similar writing styles have similar writing processes?
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