audience

I've been thinking about letters lately. Today, I wrote one and a half because according the Barbara Addler, letters make the word a better place. She said that at the first (and possibly best) Freewrite class this year and continued that writing letters, especially for self proclaimed writers, is a good exercise. If you think about it, letter writing is the art of focusing on your audience and giving them what they want to hear.

Two things have inspired my letter musings. The first is somewhat blatant: I recently received a letter from a friend. The second is a bit farther away from my point: my sister told me that she preferred reading my posts on my personal blog, The Corner Notes.

Her comment struck me as odd, not just because I blog here somewhat regularly but because I hold myself to a slightly higher standard on RP(for the most part). I feel a certain responsibility to give you guys something of merit to read. Knowing that I have two readers locked down is also somewhat encouraging.

And so I started to analyse the differences. Here, I write a bit more opinion-y stuff; there I randomly post poetry. Here, I write as if I'm speaking to the two of you; there, I write as if I'm... talking to myself? No, that's wrong. Talking to the internet? Not really. Talking to my "readers"? I guess but I don't even know who they are because I get very few comments and Google Analytics can only say so much.

I realized, to bring it rather abruptly back around, the difference is audience.

As cool as it is to have other people reading this, the people I'm writing to in my mind are you too, Rena and Vita. Whereas on my other blog I kind of just sporadically publish whatever crazy thing I want, my posts on Raving Persuasions have a few more trends. I won't lie, a lot of the time I'm grasping for topics like a desperate bingo caller pulls numbers out of a revolving bin. But on some level, I stick to topics I think the two of you are interested in. Even when I don't consciously think about it, I'm trying to write what you want to read.

Here's a theory: maybe Rachel prefers my personal blog because this one is almost exclusive. Maybe she enjoys randomness and the audience being a seemingly empty internet. Maybe she just likes the layout better.

It doesn't really matter. I'm not about to randomly change the way I blog. Still, I think it's intriguing to think about audience and the subtle ways we tweak our messages and themes to suit the different people we think we're interfacing with.

I don't even know. Readers, if you're out there?* Do you feel like weighing in on this?


*this is a very Corner Notes-esque thing to say.