“Exploring the Benefits of Blog Use in First-Year Composition: A Pilot Study”

by Jennifer Hewerdine | Xchanges 12.2/13.1

Realized Public Audience

One of the often discussed elements of blog writing is the public and “real” audience for which blogging allows. The potential audience for a blog is wider than for traditional class writing assignments. Researchers unanimously agree that the ability for anyone to publish to the web and respond to the writings of others creates a more democratic publishing system that can lead to input and response from a limitless audience (Tryon, 2006; Wei, 2010; Peterson, 2008; Richtel, 2012; Clark 34; Glogoff, 2010; Koehler, 2005; Davies 2007; Lowe and Williams, 2004). In places such as blogs, students are able to publish their work for others to see, validating the writing by providing students with a public platform on which they can present their opinions, interests, and ideas.

Several of my students discussed the potential and sometimes real public audience provided by blogging. For example, one student immediately made a connection between the typical audience in a classroom and the extended audience for which blogs allow, commenting that the blog is an “easy and different way of sharing information.” Yet another student, a self-identified politically conservative student who felt his ideas greatly differed from peers, said he consciously kept his blog public because he wanted other people to read what he had to say. A third, “Jake,” an African-American first-generation college student with self-diagnosed writing anxiety, said that the blog allowed him “freedom of speech” and to put his thoughts “out” for others to read.

In addition to students’ concern for audience understanding, having a public audience offers challenges to text ownership. One of my students had at least two students from other instructors’ courses copy work from her blog. When interviewed at the end of the semester, students discussed the invisible public audience they had not anticipated when they began using the blog. For the students, this made their writing more like professional writing in that it was seen outside of the classroom and viewed as worthy of copying. Nevertheless, there was a mixture of pride and anger about the situation: pride that their work was seen as valuable, and anger at the thought of someone taking what they had worked to accomplish.

Even those whose work was not plagiarized said they felt their writing was less contrived and no longer solely composed for the purpose of fulfilling class requirements. Clark (2010) says that when students write in digital platforms, they consider “themselves as emerging authors” (p. 29). As emerging authors publishing in public spaces, students begin to learn more about their own authority and responsibilities as a writer.