I’m entering my 14th year of the Slice of Life Challenge, and my blog contains lots of reflections and advice throughout my participation. As I enter this year, I’ve been thinking about using audience as a way to inform slices. So, here’s some advice (nope, you didn’t ask for it; yep, I’m giving it anyway) or maybe just some thoughts that might be of help (or at least of help to me!)
As an elementary school principal, my most favorite time of the day is rare time that I get into classroom to teach. I need to do it more. Really. It is the best part of any day. Recently, I had the chance to go into a 2nd grade classroom to model writing conferences. The students were working on writing recommendation letters to friends about books they’ve read. They were asked to consider the audience of who they were writing to.
As I conferred with students, I realized that considering audience was something that they needed more guidance on. I suggested that considering your audience was like following a formula:
What do I know about the person I’m writing this letter to? + What book am I recommending? = What specifically I can say to them about liking this book?
“Oooohhhhhh!” They said.
It reminded me of how important audience can be in helping us to craft our writing. Many years ago, during the SOLC challenge, I wrote four pieces about the same topic, but in 4 different formats with different audiences in mind. The result? Vastly different entries.
Oftentimes during this challenge, we struggle with finding 31 unique topics to write about. You might then, consider choose less topics and more different genres or audiences to help frame the writing in various ways. Not only is this not cheating, but writing about it in more than one way stretches your perspective, challenges your word choice, forces a revisiting and revising and gives you ample opportunity to push yourself beyond the first attempt.
So, if during these 31 days you are struggling for a new topic…write about one again…just differently. Hope this helps!
To see the 4 entries from years ago, here they are:
The Horses in my Backyard Take 1
The Horses in my Backyard Take 2
schoolinspirations 