Halt! Who Goes There?

I can’t decide what to say to you today because I don’t know who in the heck you are!

When I teach students about the proverbial rhetorical triangle–how their ideas, their audience and themselves connect–their writing instantly improves. They realize that they–with real personalities and voices–need to say Something to Someone, and that the clearer that Someone becomes, the easier it is to have Something to say.

Today I’m swimming around aimlessly with my daily blog deadline looming. It doesn’t help to recognize that my last post was #100 since switching over to WordPress. Maybe this one should be significant. But mostly, the problem is that I don’t know whom I’m talking to.

A new quarter has begun; astute students will explore this site. (I told them to.) New potential clients and opportunities keep turning up. New fans and old friends check on me. Clients, employers, poetry contest judges, literary agents, writing buddies, web-surfing strangers: there’s no telling who you are. Sometimes I address my “writer writers,” the kindred spirits who already share similar passions and skills. Sometimes this is for the dream clients who have other talents and brilliant ideas, who need my help to express them. And sometimes it’s for my students, who had dearly hoped they’d never meet another English teacher, and end up with this “cool and quirky” one. (I considered that high praise.)

Yes, I’ve considered splitting the blog for separate audiences, instead of compulsively categorizing and tagging each post for you, or at least figuring out who actually reads this. Polling attempts fell flat.

And once again, like all writers, whether we’re writing in private or public–what a weird phenomenon this is anyway–I become the only audience who gets all of me. Once again, it’s a soliloquy.