Learning to Write Publicly: Promises and Pitfalls of Using Weblogs in the Composition Classroom

One complexity of writing in an online public space is the notion of audience. When composition students engage in preparing traditional academic essays, journals, and research papers, their writing is often only read by their instructor, a very limited audience. The instructors participating in our study reported that a common goal for the blogging assignment was to foster a stronger sense of audience in student writing: for example, one reported that she wanted “the students to become aware of the needs of different audiences.” It was our hope that class blogging might better prepare students for the multiple and varied audiences that characterize much Internet communication in the Web 2.0 era.

In their responses to our first questionnaire, 55% of students reported that they believe most blogs are read only by friends and relatives, and 42% recognized a wider potential public audience of Internet users.

Many student comments suggest that they have a relatively sophisticated understanding of the public nature of blogs, explaining that the blog space is public and open to any reader who has Internet access, and some noted the mechanisms that are in place that ensure a level of “privacy.”

Such mechanisms include using the technological capabilities of certain software applications to restrict access (13% of our participants acknowledged this capability) and using a screen name that cannot be traced to your physical identity (10% noted the common use of pseudonyms online). As one student pointed out, while blogs are publicly accessible they offer a sense of privacy through the use of a screen name: “you can be whoever you want online and you can create an idenity [sic].”

Even though many students reported an understanding of blogs as public spaces with the potential to reach a wide and unknown audience in a multiple choice question on our first survey, their written comments to an open-ended question on this same pre-blogging questionnaire revealed that this understanding of audience does not necessarily lead to a strong sense of the potential consequences for their public writings. Rather, many participants reported that they do not or would not censor themselves or think about their public audience and potential consequences when writing to a blog. As characterized by one student, blogs allow writers to “voice there [sic] honest opinions without the fear of consequences for their actions.” A blog, for this student, offers a writing space that is free and protected from the consequences that might occur with communication in the physical world. A comment by another student suggests further that the opportunities for creating a sense of privacy through the use of a screen name would encourage him or her to write with less attention to audience, “because most of the time you can use whatever nickname you want so that it would be difficult for others to know who you are.” One concern with this reliance on the anonymity of a screen name is the fact that many online writers create an on-screen identity that, over time, is easily traceable to their physical identity. In fact, it is not uncommon for bloggers to share their physical world names and affiliations, or at least to share identifying information and personal stories that allow identities to be traced.

Student responses to our first questionnaire also exhibited the perception that blogging is an appropriate space to share personal information, such as that which could be included in a journal or in the context of a private face-to-face conversation. One student reported:

I feel comfortable about writing blogs only because it is the same way as writing a paper or writing in a journal. It would be my way to express myself. Art is another way I express myself and writing is definetly [sic] another way I relieve my stress. If anybody would like to know my feelings then maybe they can benefit from it or maybe they just won’t like it. However, writing or blogging to me is a way to express and nothing is going to stop me express [sic] how I feel.

Another student reported a similar sentiment, revealing a perceived sense of privacy in online spaces: “I don’t think anyone should censor themselves…. You should express exactly how you feel, as if you were talking to your best friend.”

Examining writings to the class blogs, we found evidence of this sense of a limited, private audience, in this case consisting of peers and classmates, in the ways in which students addressed their posts. For instance, in one sample post, a student posed the question, “We have been posting and commenting on this class blog for the majority of the semester. Did your experience writing on the blog change the way you write in class?” First, it is interesting to note this student’s use of the pronoun “we” and the reference to shared experience (“your experience,” “in class”). This writer clearly understood the audience for writing to be his or her classmates. Responses to this post provide further evidence of writing to a limited audience, one that is not public: one student wrote, “[w]hen writing on the blog I wrote as if I was talking to one of my friends.” At times, the use of pseudonyms actually contributed to an even more familiar form of writing. Another student reported, “My favorite part about the blog is that it is anonymous. This way you can be honest about everything your writing and not have to worry what people will think of you.” Posts like these confirm that the students, while noting that blogs have the potential to reach a public audience, had a perceived sense of a private, exclusive audience when writing to the class blogs.

Surprisingly, only two students in our initial questionnaire reported thinking about the potential consequences of reaching a wider audience when writing online. One noted that “[a]nyone can read this blog, such as a future employer or my pastor” and another explained that he or she would think carefully about what he or she wrote “[b]ecause anybody could see what you are writing and you dont [sic] want the wrong person to read the wrong thing.” Outside of these two comments, the predominant perception among our participants was that blogs are spaces in which writers can freely share personal content with a relatively limited and friendly audience. Such a discrepancy between an acknowledgement of the public nature of blogs and a lack of attention to a public audience reveals that these are issues that simply must be addressed and, arguably, in the writing classroom.

If 95% of our students are already presenting content online and actively engaging in social writing spaces, then we as writing instructors should be aware of this, encouraging and augmenting skills they already have, fostering critical awareness around their practice and helping those who are not as skilled to participate in this new public sphere.

Generally speaking, our findings show that the class blog project did encourage attention to audience and potential consequences for writing, but that the conception of audience remained fairly limited throughout the study. In the post-blogging questionnaire, 42% of the students reported that the assignment helped them to improve their writing for online spaces. While many noted improvements on how they are able to use the technology itself (i.e., understanding how to hyperlink, how to embed videos, etc.), some reported on how the blogging experience could help them to more clearly consider the potential reach and consequences for their writing. For instance, one student reported that the class blogging “made me more conscious [sic] of what I wrote or displayed” and another reported that the assignment “improved how I have to be careful and watch what I write on things like Facebook etc.” One challenge of assigning blogging in a classroom setting, however, is the potential for transferability of the skills. Will students transfer what they’ve learned from the class blogging experience to their writing in other online networked writing spaces? One student’s comment reveals a lack of such transferability:

I would say that the blogging gave me insite [sic] on realizing that a blog is almost the same as a paper, and we should use proper English and writing styles; However, I still feel that when blogging on personal webpages (such as emails, myspace and facebook etc…) you shouldn’t have to worry about proper English. Thusfore [sic] on my personal pages, I still post blogs how I ust [sic] to only because its [sic] almost like a freestyle to me. If im [sic] posting some where [sic] publicly or outside of relaxation, I do use the learned techniques.

In this comment, we see a differentiation between the type of writing done for class and that which takes place in other online spaces. Despite the fact that the potential reach of communication is the same, the type of polished writing with attention to an academic audience that was practiced by students for the class assignment, for this student, has little relevance for other online spaces.

While the students who participated in our study may have understood the potential reach of blog writing, this understanding does not, as they reported in the post-blogging questionnaire, subsequently lead them to adjust their writing practices in online spaces with potential consequences in mind. Writing with a perceived sense of limited audience and privacy, students reported that online writing is more like talking to a “best friend” than talking to a pubic audience. While blogs have the potential to reach a wider public audience, many students reported that they felt that the anonymity of writing with a screen name and the perceived sense of writing for friends and classmates, as opposed to a larger public audience, made thinking carefully about potential negative consequences for their writing irrelevant.