My Writing to the "World"

I believe that writing no matter the purpose has an intended reader, whether that will be a teacher, a friend, yourself, or the world. While I haven't contributed much to the vast amounts of writing in the world, I can say that I have written numerously in the other three areas. One piece of writing where I believed I conveyed my message effectively was an essay I had to write last year for my English class. The prompt was to argue how Lytton Strachey viewed Florence Nightingale based on an article he wrote about her.

The intended audience of my essay was my English teacher. An assumption that I made was that she would know who both Lytton Strachey and Florence Nightingale are and what Florence Nightingale contributed to society, being commonly labeled as the "founder of modern nursing". These were reasonable assumptions because she was the one who gave us the prompt, therefore it would make sense that she would have a good enough background to understand what I would be talking about. 

I guess unknowingly I created an essay in which my language was appropriate for the situation. I say unknowingly because at the time, I only needed to write an essay on the subject. I was only trying to get it done; I wasn't trying to take my audience in consideration (at least not consciously) because the only thing going through my mind at the time was probably along the lines of "Hey I have to write this essay. I should get it done." Because the prompt was not one where I had to put in my personal opinion of Nightingale, I only had to analyze what Strachey's argument was. I needed to use facts, what he said in this article to back up my hypothesis of what I believed his view were. Hence, there was no room to put in assumptions about stereotypes and gender, among other things, how Lunsford describes in the reading.