Speaking to a Public Audience

In choosing a piece that addresses voice and audience I had to look no further than my discussion board postings.  Each unit had a discussion board that gave us topics to write a discussion board posting about, that were intended to help foster discussion, in regards to that particular topic.  It was my goal throughout the quarter, to create postings that were well thought out, gave the reader something to think about, and add some depth to the content of the discussion boards.  I often tried to pick an idea that wasn’t the “low hanging fruit,” and expand upon it.  After a while, reading about the same idea over and over gets a little tedious and boring.  The piece that I selected which highlighted my awareness of audience and voice was the final discussion board posting from the tradition unit about pop-culture.  After writing these for an entire quarter, I have gotten better at working the idea of making the reader think, into a piece, that will have a public audience. The prompt for the posting was to select a given assumption about pop-culture and affirm or challenge that assumption.  The assumption that I supported was that pop culture reflects the most current issues and trends in society.  I made an effort to elicit some thought on the part of whoever decided to read my posting and got responses that reflected that.  I think the statement “sadly, there are amazingly talented musicians and entertainers, whose talents are overshadowed by the freight train that seems to be pop culture” provided some imagery and food for thought for the reader to digest, and come to some kind of conclusion.   After all, what’s the point of speaking to an audience if you don’t give them something to think about?