Audience and blogging, Part 2

I think that blogging is going to make be a better teacher. The way I have experienced a developing sense of audience on this blog has given me some new insight into writing processes. My whole concept of audience in the past has been static--pre-defined--and I didn't even realize it.

When I started this blog I had never read a blog before. It felt similar to journaling--talking to myself, really, but as someone who journaled for years I appreciate the value of that. But as I read others' blogs and started joining conversations, I got a new sense of what this could be. Not a platform for me to purge my thoughts but an actually community with an active exchange of ideas. I named the blog "Mommy, Ph.D." with an idea of what I wanted to talk about and the persona I wanted to construct. I was amazed at how many others were doing the same--talking about women's issues, the politics of motherhood, the world of academia, the expereince of graduate school--sometimes separately but very often all at the same time. Why hadn't I seen this before?!

Then I added the tracker (Thanks, Amy!) and checked it faithfully. People were reading my blog! By the end of the first week, PEOPLE were reading my blog! I can honestly say I was shocked. Seeing who was surfing in from where, what search terms led them to me, what messages got comments, what messages got a ton of readers but not necessarily a lot of comments--all of that helped me understand what kind of audience I had, what I could have, what I should be writing about, what people want to read about. Being in this process is paying off in ways I anticipated--learning enough to teach blogs, exploring pedagogical potential--and ways I did not expect--(I started another list here, but it did not satisfy me, so I will leave this space undefined). And it's fun!