My 'Almost' Public Writing

My writing has been mostly relegated to academic papers for most of my "career." That is why I do not have too much experience writing for large groups of people. One time that I actually had trouble writing was my last research paper of high school. While not "writing to the world," this paper was written as though it was a public piece. I had to write in a way that would seem educated to my teacher, but that my peers in class would understand it as well. This was made more difficult because many of those peers did not care about the paper or the class, so I had trouble receiving any feedback to help make the paper better and more understandable. So to fix the issues I was having, I tried to put the language into more of a similar dialogue from how we all normally talked, such as Lunsford mentions in the book, from our local community to give off a "down-home" sense in my paper. This made the paper more simplified, so that they could better understand. I felt this would make my paper more original because I was not just stating what a book or source said, but I was able to have my own voice as a writer. Lunsford tells that we should really watch who we are writing to, and that we are always taking the chance of having people of different backgrounds reading our papers. This was really not the case when it came to my paper, because we had ALL grown up together in the same area, and had known each other for years before, so I knew who I would be writing to.