24/7 customer support
Professional writers
No plagiarism
Privacy guarantee
Affordable prices
94% of return customers
Free title page
Free bibliography
Free formatting
Free of plagiarism
Free delivery
| Home |
| Order form |
| Contact us |
| Blog |
| Three Tricky Relationships to an Audience |
| Perhaps you've noticed there are two distinct kinds of difficulty in writing. One kind feels as though you are straining to lift a heavy load of bricks onto your shoulder or struggling to carry something unwieldy across a stream with only slippery stepping-stones to walk on or trying to thread a needle whose eye is almost invisibly small. Taxing or scary or frustrating but also clean, hard work. But there's that other kind. You are trying to fight your way out from under a huge deflated silk balloon -- layers and layers of light gauzy material which you can bat away, but they always just flop back again and no movement or exertion gets you any closer to the open air. Or you are lost in a dense fog with no sense of direction-or rather just enough sense of direction to realize you are going in circles. Or you are sinking slowly into swamp mud and every effort to crawl or swim gets you in deeper. Or you are trying to saw through a thick plank and the harder you try the tighter your saw gets stuck in the cut. It's this kind of difficulty that makes you feel helpless and angry and finally stops you. I have learned that when my writing feels difficult in the first way, it is a sign that I am indeed wrestling with the difficulties of writing itself: figuring out my thoughts, working out the logic, finding language for what is just barely emergent in my mind, or finding the right approach for a difficult audience. But when I experience that second kind of difficulty, it means I haven't yet managed to get my teeth into the writing task itself. There is some mix-up. Often it is because I am going about my work in a selfdefeating way -- perhaps trying to edit my words carefully while I'm only just writing out my earliest tentative thinking. But often it's a mix-up about audience. This feeling of working at cross-purposes to my goal -- this continual racing of the motor while the gears refuse to engage -- often comes from being afraid of the audience or confused about who it is or mistaken about what I am trying to do to it.I talked in the last chapters about the difficulties caused by dangerous audiences -- inside and outside your head -- and how to work on these difficulties. And about how to use or avoid the focusing or organizing force exerted by audience. But in addition there are certain relationships to an audience that are inherently tricky because at the same time that they make it hard to write well, they also keep you from realizing what is causing the difficulty. Here are the three that I have noticed as I watch myself and others struggle: writing when you are trying to persuade readers, when readers are compelling you to write, and when your writing is entirely uninvited. |
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
24/7 customer support
Written from scratch papers only
Any citation style
Fully referenced
Never resold papers
275 words per page Courier New font