College Writing vs. Scholarly Writing: Or Why Audience Matters

I realize I haven't followed up on any of the promises made in my original blogifesto. However, this was for a very good reason, as I spent four days in Louisville attending a national conference on college writing, CCCC. I experienced a lot of exciting things in Louisville, including

• Eating a maple glazed donut topped with bacon (actually quite delicious)
• Attending cocktail hour at Churchill Downs
• Seeing composition scholars I actually cited in my thesis

Of all my experiences on this trip though, the most exciting thing was witnessing and taking part in the living, breathing conversation that is academic writing and research. I've been thinking quite a bit about college and scholarly writing lately because a few of my students wrote research papers on helping undergraduate students transition from what I'll call college writing, or the kind of writing you do in undergrad classes, to real academic or "scholarly" writing. I think it's important to distinguish between these two types of writing:

College writing is what we would call "writing to learn" writing. It involves summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing. Of course it involves research, and it definitely involves trying to say something new (albeit typically about a work of fiction or piece of research that's already been widely discussed in academic circles. However, the primary purpose of most college writing is not to add something to an evolving conversation, but rather to develop one's own intellect and power of observation and analysis.

Scholarly writing, on the other hand, requires all the same faculties as college writing, but it demands additional exertions too. Not only do you have to research, analyze, and synthesize, but you have to do so in the context of a larger conversation about a particular issue. In other words, you can't just write something that's interesting or new to you. Scholarly writing must also be interesting and new to those who will read it as well.

So the difference between college and academic writing isn't just the kinds of skills you use to produce it, or even the elevation of the language you use in your prose; rather, the real difference is a difference in audience. While college writing is typically written for the author's own benefit and frequently addressed to a professor who's required to plow through the dullness in order to give the thing a grade, scholarly writing is addressed to an outside audience. And not just any audience--it's addressed to an educated audience, an audience who knows what's going on and isn't going to take what you say at face value. Scholarly writing is addressed to an audience who will stop reading if what you say is puerile, inane, or poorly written.

This difference in audience isn't just important to our distinction between college writing and scholarly writing, although it's a nice way to distinguish between the two. This difference in audience is the difference between ineffectual and effectual writing. It's the difference I teach when I teach persuasive writing. The truth is, most real writing you do (i.e. anything that's not journal writing) is not written for you; it's written for someone else. You're not persuading yourself, you're persuading your audience! This means you have to think about what your audience knows, what they value, which assumptions guide their reasoning, etc. etc. The writing we produce every day in our jobs and interactions with others can't be about us. In order to be effectual, it must be adapted and targeted to a specific audience.

What I learned in Louisville (in addition to learning that donuts + bacon = double deep fried deliciousness) is that any kind of real world writing must be part of a conversation. As I listened to scholars read their research, I became part of a conversation directed at a very specific audience. And I not only remembered, but also experienced the truth that if you don't address your audience, and if you don't consider what that audience might know, believe, and value, then you're just producing collegiate crap that no one but your professor wants to read.

A Blog-ifesto

Authors basically have two options when they begin a blog: they can either begin en medias res and jump right in, pretending like this kind of writing about their lives has been going on for ages, or they can begin with a manifesto for their blog, a piece of writing not unlike the Mayflower compact or other founding documents. I have chosen the latter for my introductory post.

So here it is: my blog-ifesto, in which I define my writer's blog and the reasoning behind it. First, the reasoning. As a young adult, I enjoyed creative writing immensely, but never thought of myself as a true "writer." I never aspired to be a successful writer because I could only think of writing as creative writing. All the other writing I did, for school, work, church, life, etc. didn't quite count as "writing" because it wasn't creative. I never thought I could be a writer, because creative writing wasn't my thing.

Flash forward to the present: I'm a soon-to-be graduate with a Masters in English. I've spent the last three years writing and teaching writing at the university level. I've written everything from lesson plans to budget memos to a 26-page thesis on freshman English. And it dawned on me, just a week or so ago, that I am, as it turns out, a writer.

I don't write haikus, I don't opine in personal essays, and I definitely don't write any kind of fiction. But I do write, and I write often. I write to make it through every single day. I write to communicate with students, with family, with bosses, and with potential employers. I write for all kinds of audiences and all kinds of purposes. I know I'm not the only one out there doing this kind of writing. I know this partly because my writing is usually prompted by someone else's writing (an email, etc.), and partly because I know that the writing skills and strategies I try so hard to pass on to my freshman and advanced writing students eventually get put to use in jobs, in civic lives, and in personal relationships.

In other words, we are all writers. We can't reserve the lofty label of writer for those who craft poems or crank out newspaper stories. We all must be writers to get along in our world. And that's exactly what this blog will be about: how we use writing to get along in our world every day.

Now for the details. Here's a preview of what I'll write about:

• I'll mostly post about different kinds of writing everyday writers do, sorted by purpose
• I'll also post about writing tips/tricks
• I'll probably post the occasional reflective piece, delving into deeper issues of writing in our society

Some things I won't do? Well, we'll figure that out as we go along. But I canNOT commit to refraining from

• Overuse of alliteration
• Multiple "not only, but also" constructions in a single post
• The occasional rant on ineffective communication (a la FAIL blog)

Since that nicely sums up my purpose for the blog and what you might find here, and since, in accordance with the genre of manifestos (man I love creating linked words!), this manifesto has been sufficiently long and humorless, I think it's wise to end things here. Come back for more glimpses into this writer's writing life.