Difficulties in Writing to the World

An example of a time that I had difficulty in public writing was writing a sports article for my high school newspaper during my junior year.  I am a passionate sports fan myself, so it was incredibly easy for me to talk about the basketball game that I was covering and to analyze it in my own language.  The difficulty I found was meeting audience expectations, which is mentioned in Lunsford's writing on page 233.  She mentions that authors need to assess their relationship with the audience, as well as establishing authority as a writer.  I went into writing this article thinking that it would be effortless to write about a basketball game, but I found during the editing process that you had to be much more clear and concise in your descriptions in order for the whole school audience to understand what you were talking about.  Not everyone knew every basketball player's name, and some readers probably don't even know much about basketball.  Another difficulty was appealing to a student audience and a potential teacher audience as well.  Lunsford also mentions that your style of language and word choice should fit your audience as well.  It became difficult to try and use language that would work for a student audience in a student newspaper while also sounding professional to a faculty and parent audience.