On my “to do” list for today is a seemingly simple task: set up blog.  Who, though, is the audience for this blog?  What will be my purpose in posting to it next year?  If I don’t have a clear audience and purpose, I just won’t post.  This I know.

I teach the acronym P.A.G.E. to clarify writing tasks: Purpose, Audience, Genre, and Exigence.  Clearly I’ve already established a genre: these blog posts.  There may be sub-genres of storytelling, reporting, summarizing, and argumentation within these posts.  But why post, and relatedly, for whom?  What’s my exigence?  This one-year sabbatical creates a rhetorical situation during which I’ll be living across the Atlantic from family, friends, and colleagues.  They are my audience.  What is it that they want to hear?  What is it that I want to tell them (and to discover for myself through the routine practice of writing)?

I guess I’m an idealist, because when thinking of purpose, I ask myself what the change is that I want to see in the world.  First, I admit there are changes I want to see in my immediate emotional life.  I would like to be closer, more articulate, more known, by my circle of family and friends.  This blog would be a way to be those things, a way to invite and sustain conversation.  Friends and family may or may not go to my blog, but they might, or they will as much as they will like to.  This would help them to feel like I’m somehow accessible over the year abroad, and maybe to get to know me better as I get to know myself better through writing. This could be an opportunity to offer armchair travel to those at home, and armchair thoughts on teaching and education and argumentation and so on.  So the tags I can imagine are

• Netherlands
• Travel
• Writing
• Argumentation
• Teaching
• Family
• Identity

I include identity on that list, because having just turned 40, I want to use this sabbatical to help me to chart a course for the next ten years.

Will this blog be a narrative? Narratives have characters who have aspirations, hit problems, and make their way through them.  For this text, then, I am the protagonist.  What is my aspiration?  To actually be a happy writer, mother, and global citizen next year.  To chart a course for the next ten years.  To let my loved ones know who I am.  To go away, to be fully present, and to come home again.  To learn about scholarship on teaching argumentation and to use that in my own life to help to enact the change that I want to see in the world and to be prepared to teach my students (and other teachers so that they can teach their students) how to argue well for the change that they want to see in the world.  Stay tuned to see me revise that last sentence to make it more concise.