The little lessons of audience. A student has started to have a very clear sense of her blog's project and intended audience, and this makes it much easier to make decisions about writing and revising. She has a worthy project -- she wants to provide local resources for grappling with domestic violence as well as link to good information from a wider range of reputable sites outside our area. Once a writer has a real focus she can start to see clarifying choices in composing and revising even in the brief posts that a blogger writes everyday.

For example, this sentence ends her brief posting about what a domestic violence shelter might be like:

Safe Horizons is a great source if you want additional information about domestic violence.

We know that the blog is about domestic violence, so the sentence really only provides a link and a generic bit of praise -- no new information. But the blogger has spent time at the site, presumably, and knows that it is a good site with some especially good pages on this or that. And the writer knows the audience she hopes to serve, in the deepest sense of the word. With that in mind, a revision starts to suggest itself, one of many, really, for the more we know who we want to serve with our sites the more interesting and varied our choices become:

Safe Horizons provides a good overview of the problem of domestic violence and especially good pages on topic a and topic b. (whatever the site's strengths might be...)

We could be looking at one general link and three more particular ones, then, just because the blogger has thought further about what she can offer her real audience. Going even further, the blogger can engage the particular approach taken by Safe Horizons -- what ideas animate their approach to domestic violence, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of those ideas? The bland sentence can become a short paragraph or a whole post of much more value to the real reader facing a powerful problem.

A growing sense of audience makes all the difference, then, enabling some of the most important values of blogging:

generosity with your time, your insights, your experience; generosity with linking; careful editorial work annotating the best of the web.

Other values, equally important, reside behind these:

confidence in one's judgment, in one's right to speak, in one's ability to do the work necessary to make a substantial contribution; confidence in an open exchange of ideas and information; confidence or hope in the future.

As a blogger comes to understand her project, she comes to know her audience; it may be the other way around. In either case, the blogger begins to serve that audience at a higher and higher level while making the nuts and bolts decisions of writing a sentence, evaluating a site, or annotating a link. [0 & P]