Unit One: Written Communication Audience, Purpose, Style, & Process

Unit One: Written Communication—Audience, Purpose, Style, & Process

Major Skills: essay structure—thesis statements, topic sentences, paragraphing; focus; development of writer’s opinion; organization; English grammar, syntax, vocabulary

The document that we have looked at was written in 1881 by my great-great-grandfather, Young Lee MacDihel, three weeks after the death of his wife. My family found this document in a family Bible a few years ago; it had been hidden there for over a century. When I first read it, I was touched by the emotion in the document. Then I started thinking about it, and the more I thought about it, the more interesting it became to me. The letter/prayer made me consider many issues related to writing—why we write, how we change our writing to be appropriate for different readers, and, above all, the power of writing. Lee Dihel was a simple farmer who probably had only a few years of education—it is obvious that he was not highly educated—yet he chose to use writing as a method to . . . to do what? What, indeed, was his purpose in writing this letter or prayer, and whom was he writing to?

We can ask many questions about this piece of writing: Why do you think Mr. Dihel wrote this letter or prayer? What is the real meaning of Mr. Dihel’s writing? What is this writing? Is it a letter (to whom?), or is it a prayer (for what purpose?)? Do the errors in the writing make it less effective? Does Mr. Dihel make you understand how he feels? Can you feel his emotion in his writing? Why or why not? Was he really writing to his god (the superficial audience), or was he trying to establish a connection with his dead wife? Or was he writing to himself, simply to purge his own feelings of grief? Or, perhaps, was he leaving a legacy for his daughter to find sometime in the future?

In order to understandthis “text,” you must consider the relationship between Mr. Dihel’s intended audience and his purpose in writing, in the context of his current life situation. Think about all the aspects of this text’s rhetorical context. For example, why did he choose to write instead of just thinking? If he is writing to alleviate his grief, why did he not instead choose to talk to a friend? Writing must have been difficult for him, since he had so little formal education. So what could writing give him that merely thinking or speaking could not? And if he is writing to God to find faith in the face of his sorrow, why did he write instead of simply praying silently? If he believed in God, then he must have believed that God could hear his silent prayer. So why write? What does writing do that thinking or talking cannot do? Also, we should look at Mr. Dihel’s extremely formal, archaic language. How do people choose an appropriate style for communicating with an audience, especially one they’ve never met?

Finally, consider this question: Do we, now, in an age of electronic writing, still use the written word for the same purposes as Mr. Dihel did, and with the same relationship to writing as he had? Do we regard writing differently now? Do we interact with our readers differently? Has our writing process changed with the advent of new communication technology? Are we as careful when we write as people were in the past? Have our new technologies given us greater ability to control our writing style, or have they “flattened” our style so that we don’t often think about how we can/should change our style for different purposes and audiences?
Essay: Opinion—The Impact of Writing Technologies on the Reader-Writer Relationship

As we have discussed, writing often seems to have more power than spoken words. It seems more permanent, for one thing; it also allows us to organize our thoughts, and it allows us to revise and reconsider our thoughts before we “deliver” them to someone else. The process of writing—seeing our words on the page or screen and fitting them into proper sentences—forces us to review our ideas and see if they make sense. And often our ideas change as we try to write them down; we understand our own ideas better through writing. Thus writing is not only a process of transcribing pre-formed ideas, but a process of thinking.

Furthermore, in writing as opposed to speech, our audience is not present to tell us if we’re unclear, so we have to be both writer and reader at the same time, checking our words to see if they’re courteous, clear, accurate, easy to understand, and powerful enough to make our audience get our point. In other words, we have to imagine ourselves to be our reader, and then we switch back to our “writer identity” and make corrections and clarifications based on our sense of the reader’s response or understanding. The ability to make this switch quickly and efficiently is the mark of a good writer. However, new writing technologies may be changing the ways that we write and the ways that we form relationships with readers.

Some aspects of writing that are affected by modern writing technologies are, for example, its permanence and its privacy. In some ways, digital writing is more permanent than writing with a pen on paper; whether you know it or not, everything you post on Facebook is probably being archived by the owners of that social utility, and your words may come back to haunt you later. But writing on a screen or online feels less permanent than the words we put on paper, doesn’t it? It’s so easy to erase it that it seems to carry less importance or less weight than writing with ink or pencil. Also, while e-mails may be sent to only one person, they can be distributed widely by anyone who receives them or has access to your computer; and, again, Facebook actually owns the content of your personal page and can do whatever the company directors want to do with it. In short, online writing is not really very private.

I think that our relationship to our reader changes when we write e-mails, text messages, Facebook posts, tweets, and even Word documents as opposed to paper-and-pen documents. Our writing in these formats is more immediate (i.e., less mediated by physical constraints such as the awkwardness of holding a pen, as well as more quickly done). Thus we may be more careless, less courteous, in our e-mails and Facebook posts than we would be in a handwritten letter or essay. And these habits may transfer to our formal, professional writing. Also, we are often, on Facebook, writing not to one acquaintance only but to everyone who is our “friend” on Facebook—and we have “friends” from all parts of our lives, people with whom we have different real-world relationships. Our writing may change as a result of this kind of writing, and we may forget how to adapt style to purpose, audience, writing situation.

How do you think that these differences change the way we use language in an electronic medium? Do you write differently in a text message than in a paper letter that you will send through the post? (Have you ever written a paper letter and sent it through the post???) If so, why? Does the 140-character limit on tweets (on Twitter) change your thinking process? Does text-message spelling change the way that you feel about your subject?

Perhaps most importantly, does electronic writing change the way you perceive and relate to your reader? Are you closer to your text-message reader than you are to your paper-letter reader? Do you use your “real voice” when you’re posting a comment on Facebook, or does the wide audience force you to become someone different? Do you think that you’re more self-centered in the electronic medium? Are you able to truly engage your readers as individuals on Facebook, or do your readers become an undifferentiated mass, with no personal characteristics? In other words, do you think about your reader as carefully as you do when you write on paper, and do you construct your own personality as carefully?

Here’s the question for your assignment: How do modern communication technologies impact the ways that we interact with each other in written language? Are electronic writing technologies damaging human relationships by encouraging us to be careless in our expression (less use of courtesy conventions, less proofreading, writing too quickly), or are these technologies bringing us closer because they encourage spontaneous expression? For example, are we losing something valuable (clarity and depth of expression) when we abandon formal writing with introductions, bodies, and conclusions, careful editing, punctuation? Or are we gaining something valuable (greater quantity of interactions, more honesty) when we adopt more immediate but less formal methods of communicating in written words? Do social networking sites offer ordinary people the opportunity to have a stronger voice in public debate, since everyone can express his or her opinions to a wide audience? Or is public discourse becoming diluted and even degraded by the presence of so many non-expert voices, with no one editing and proofreading and censoring the content?

Write an essay (about4 pages, minimum 3 body paragraphswith a topic sentence for each), with a strong introduction and a strong conclusion expressing your opinion on this topic. Focus on one general area: relationship with an audience, writing purpose, writing style, and writing process. Then find a specific topic within your focus area. Please do not write about the convenienceof electronic communication. You might write about the loss of mutual respect between readers and writers in electronic communication, or the potential of offending readers in quick messages, or the democratic potential of online debate, or the loss of real intellectual understanding between readers and writers in unstructured writing, or the global opportunities (or superficiality) of friendship via online social networks, or the impact on writing process, or how “writing” is now not just the use of words for communication but also visuals.

Organize your discussion carefully so it would be easy for a reader to follow and understand your ideas. You should not do any research for this essay; I want you to express your own opinion, based on your own experience.

Although you will write about changes in modern writing styles, this is not simply a comparison/contrast essay discussing the differences between old and new writing technologies. You must analyze your topic carefully. In other words, support and develop your main idea in a variety of ways, with different kinds of sub-points. You should use logical analysis such as cause and effect, comparison, contrast, classification of types; you may also use description, history, definition, personal experience. You should, of course, use specific examples to develop your discussion, and you should use a creative, interesting writing style.

Sample Thesis Statements for the Essay

Your thesis statement for the essay should be one or two sentences (no more than two) that orient your readers to your discussion—in other words, the thesis helps your readers to get mentally prepared to read the essay, to start thinking about the topic, and start generating their own ideas on the topic. You want your readers to go through your thinking process with you; your thesis starts them on that path. Your thesis must clearly express your focus on the topic, a focus narrow enough for this short essay; and it must precisely express your perspective and your opinion on that focus. The thesis must be interesting and use powerful vocabulary, and it must show the relationships between ideas clearly and elegantly.

Social utilities like Facebook certainly do help to bring old friends back together and to introduce us to people who may become new friends; however, we are fooling ourselves if we think that these technologies actually deepen our friendships. In fact, they give a false sense of closeness that can ultimately leave us more isolated than our ancestors were when they migrated to new lands and had to wait months or years for news from home.

Since people started using social utilities like Twitter and Facebook to air their political views, public discourse has become degraded. The most absurd statements are “published” without the constraints of careful research and preliminary thought, and are then read and believed by millions, leading us into a downward spiral of meaninglessness in which no one even cares about accuracy or consequences anymore—it’s all spectacle, all sensationalism.

The web may seem like nothing more than a wider-reaching, fancier version of traditional media where the powerful dominate the public conversation, but, if we the citizens use it conscientiously, it can become the mainspring of a new democratic uprising that will change the world.

The market economy is so engrained in Western ideology and social structures that it will quash any attempts by ordinary people to use web-based social networking for democratic purposes. The profit imperative will always win out over progressive ideals, and our voices will be silenced in the rush to make money out of every new web platform that gets invented.

The entire structure of writing has been changed by electronic media, and so the subject of writing classes must also change. “Writing” now means the manipulation of aural and visual text elements as well as words, so students must be given the opportunity to learn how to negotiate a multimodal process of writing in order to be professionally and socially successful in the digital age.

Writing in electronic mediums makes the process of writing much more fluid and natural; it is easy, on a keyboard, to move ideas from one’s mind to the page without losing thoughts and the connections among them. On the other hand, this fluidity encourages the belief that the first draft is the last draft, and so while “invention” gains, “revision” loses.

Reading an Old Piece of Writing: Young Lee MacDihel’s Letter/Prayer

Below is a letter or a prayer written by my great-great-grandfather, Young Lee MacDihel (also called Lee Dihel) three weeks after the death of his wife on May 6, 1881. The infant he refers to in the letter/prayer was two years old at the time. A scan of the original document is on your Angel page.

When I first read this document, I was struck by several things. First of all, the handwriting was incredibly hard to read. But even after I deciphered the letters, I had to puzzle over the words—Mr. Dihel did not divide words in the usual places. He sometimes combined two words into one, and he sometimes separated single words into two parts. And his spelling is atrocious! He obviously did not have much formal education. Mr. Dihel also used archaic (out of date) word forms such as “wouldst” and “hast” for “would” and “has” and “thou” and “thy” for “you” and “your.” He would have learned these word forms from reading his Bible, which would have been the King James version, which used some Old English words. People used to feel that the older forms of the language were more respectful, more formal, and therefore more appropriate for religious purposes.

A Literal Transcription of Young Lee Dihel’s Original Letter/Prayer

May the 27th, 1881.

o God it it is atryinG Scene that ihave hade to pass throo all most moore than Flesh Couldede in dure omi God iam solone ley now Sepratede here onearthe from one sodier to miharte this worlde seems to me alonesome willerness whene she was hear onearth I injoyed this Life But But now mi Lorde I aske not LonGe Life ionley beG and intrus inthe KinGdom of Gode now lorde thouGh haste takin mi earthley healpe mate ande spirit youal healpe mate thrue this Life now Lorde wouldest thoue be pleasede to let thi holey spirit Dwell withe mee ande olorde it is mi prare that thouGhe wouldste Keepe me faithful un till Death shal c[a]ll me home ande omi Gode wouldest in able me to take care of thate Litle motherls in fante of mine now Lorde iaske the B[l]essinGs of Gode to wreste on meeande Mindie onie Dihel now ileave our lives in thi Care our Soles to thi surves.

Keepe us faith full un till Death

Mindie onie Dihel

Lee Dihel

now olorde in abel us

to sa let thi will be

dune under all

Sir Combe Stances
A Corrected Version of Young Lee Dihel’s Letter/Prayer

Oh, God, it—it is a trying scene that I have had to pass through, almost more than flesh could endure. Oh, my God, I am so lonely now, separated here on earth from one so dear to my heart. This world seems to me a lonesome wilderness. When she was here on earth, I enjoyed this life. But—but now my Lord, I ask not long life, I only beg and entrust in the kingdom of God. Now Lord, thou hast taken my earthly helpmate and spiritual helpmate through this life. Now Lord, wouldst thou be pleased to let thy holy spirit dwell with me, and oh, Lord, it is my prayer that thou wouldst keep me faithful until death shall call me home. And oh, my God, wouldst enable me to take care of that little motherless infant of mine. Now Lord, I ask the blessings of God to rest on me and Mindie Onie Dihel. Now I leave our lives in thy care, our souls to thy service.