I just wanted to share a brief update about what I’ll be focusing on in future blog posts. So far I’ve experimented with different topics on the blog, such as blogging, teaching, rhetoric, audience building, and writing tools.
I’ve talked about the difficulty of figuring out who it is I’m writing to. And about the need to at some point narrow down my target audience. Looking back at some of my posts, I can see that sometimes I am clearly writing to writers, particularly ones who are writing online. And sometimes I am writing to fellow teachers. For example, the previous post, The English Teacher Gone Bad, is clearly meant for other teachers. Student writers, the vast majority of them, would have no interest in such a post. And why would they? I’m not talking them.
On the other hand, the more instructional content is less likely to appeal to teachers (except as potential resources to share with their students). It’s almost impossible to talk to both; you can face only one direction at a time.
So going forward, I’ll be focusing almost entirely on writers—student writers, creative writers, professional writers. In addition to narrowing the target audience, I’ll be narrowing down the content focus to prose style. Prose style, as I mentioned in the previous post, is a common concern shared by a diverse group of writers; it’s a good starting point for carrying out my goal to help writers beyond the 60-90 students I teach each semester. And according to Richard Lanham, it happens to comprise a crucial set of skills for flourishing in the Information Age. (It also makes the blog align better with the other content on the website, which is all writer-centered).
So starting with the next post, I’ll be introducing a series of style tips writers may find useful as they create prose for their varying writing projects. We’ll see how it goes.