Writing is such a complex thing. It can be as short as a poem or as long as a book, but I believe the most important thing is writing for your audience. To create a successful piece of writing, you must write in favor of your audience. For instance, a paper I write for my creative writing professor will sound very different from the email I write to future employers. With creative writing, you can play with different ideas and be as free with the ideas you conspire as you want. With “professional” writing, a person may want to sound intelligent and appeal to their clientele. Elizabeth Wardles You Can’t Teach Writing explores and expands on the ideas of writing for your audience. I resonate with this idea greatly because I have had to write a very wide variety of papers for very different teachers over the years. I have had professors who require a specific format and have guided me in how and what I should write each paragraph of my paper about. In my History class just last year, | was given a two-page instruction sheet of exactly what my essay should consist of. It explained how many pages I should have, how many words I used, and even what information should be included throughout. Though this would seem like it made my life easier, it honestly made writing the paper more rigorous because I could not write freely. In contrast to this, I currently have a professor who does not believe in giving a required amount of pages or exact rubrics. He is my audience and allows me to write freely, whereas my history professor last year had exact expectations. This just proves Wardle’s idea that we have write to our specific audiences.
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