When writing, it can be difficult to exactly pinpoint what you will write about, and how you will focus on that main topic. Personally, I can often struggle with choosing a topic for a writing assignment, such as the recent Discourse Community essay, where I initially had trouble thinking about what I wanted to write about, before settling on my job as the main topic. Author E. Shelly Reid’s article “Ten Ways To Think About Writing: Metaphoric Musing for College Writing Students” offers several tips for improving your writing skills and ability to write effectively. Those pieces of advice were put into three easy to understand rules, with those rules being to write about what you know, to show instead of to tell, and to adapt to your audience.
The first rule Reid stated was to write about what you understand well and or what you are passionate about. You want to have a basic to strong understanding of what your main topic is as you should be able to understand it well and be able to explain it in detail. The next rule, show don’t tell, is common in various forms of media, including writing. When showing something like a character trait, you what to show a character having that trait to better establish a character as acting like that instead of lazily just telling us what to think or feel. The final rule, adapt to your audience, emphasizes how your audience is important to your writing and how you write. If you are writing to a specific audience, like a group of young children or a group of college graduates, you will change how you write and what language you use when addressing your audience.
Overall, all the rules for varying degrees rely on your audience and how they are related to your writing. When writing, you need to think about what you can make your topic understandable and appealing to your audience. Showing instead of telling will help the ideas you want to establish be able to connect with the audience. Finally, the type of audience will help you be able to dictate the type of language you will use when creating your writing. If you fail to connect with your audience, then your creating will fail and fall flat.
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