This week I have been leading the LMWP institute fellows into a writing life.  On day 1, I ask them to consider the fundamental question:  why do humans write?  What purposes motivate us to write?  What verbs do we use to describe what we hope to accomplish with the variety of types of texts?  On day 2, I lead a discussion of audience.  For whom do we write?  Does it help or hinder writers to hold their imagined audience in mind as they draft?  Should we, as Peter Elbow recommends, “close our eyes as we write” the first draft, and only revise with audience in mind.  We also discussed the difficulty of writing for audiences who we don’t know very well.  Kids who write for adult teachers.  College freshmen who write for faculty.  New faculty who write for scholarly journals.    I modeled making a list of audience that inspire me to write.  I realized that even the same people, like LMWP TCs, are two different audiences when I think of them as teachers and as researchers.  Similarly, I want to write advice about how to improve the teaching of writing for an audience of GVSU SWS instructors and for those GVSU instructors as potential research partners.  I also want to write to my children, but my purpose changes (and thereby my topics, tone, and diction) according to the age at which I want them to read the text.  Am I writing for Caroline to read now as a 6 year old?  Or am I writing to her as a 16 year old trying to figure out how to be a a healthy adult?  These same physical people can be different audiences.

I also have a couple of aspirational literary journals (Fourth Genre and Brevity) to which I would like to send essays.

With my writing group today, I realized that my most pressing purpose is to entertain this audience of 2015 LMWP fellows.  I want to write something to read aloud (tomorrow and on our final Thursday) that will delight in some way.  I asked my writing group to flood me with questions about living in Utrecht last year.  I want to know what is of interest to them.  Having an immediate and familiar exigence is helpful.