Know Your Audience

 

Whenever we write or create, we should begin with two questions: Who is my audience? And what do I want my audience to know? These are the questions I referred to during every step of revising my introductory video.

The Original 

Our first assignment was to create a short introductory video, including information about myself and my use of social media. My original video was just that—a video. While it did provide a visual, like the ancient Greeks, I limited my vision to only oratory and speech (Lawrence, 2022). 

Here's a short clip from my original post.

In one take, while sitting at my classroom desk, I introduced myself and elaborated on both my personal and my professional use of social media. The background was my cluttered school bookshelf, and one doesn’t have to look too hard to realize that I wasn’t making eye contact with the camera because I was reading from a script on my laptop screen. My video had no text, no added visuals, and no audio other than me talking. I filmed and posted the video in under five minutes. Visually, it would probably feel right at home in the DON’T section of a digital writing how-to manual. In its defense, though, my original video was “truthful, accurate, and honest” (Lawrence, 2022, p. 33). I do not consistently use social media in many aspects of day-to-day life, and I felt comfortable sharing that.

The Revision

Upon reviewing the guidelines for the revised video, though, it quickly became clear that I would be better off scrapping the original and starting fresh. The new assignment expanded my potential audience to include not just my classmates, but also my students, their parents, and other educators. This was a game changer. Just as “students revise more and spend more time on task when they are engaged in a project that has an audience beyond their teacher,” I spent significantly more time creating the new video (Strassman & O’Connell, n.d., para. 5). Because of the expanded audience, I wanted it to have a broader appeal and a more polished, professional look.

 

I decided to use Canva and QuickTime Player to create my video. I have used each of these tools previously, but never to create a presentation. As “most digital writing is multimodal in nature,” I knew I needed to include other elements of design in the revised version of my video, paying closer attention to the effects that the combined use of visuals, video, and design can have (Lawrence, 2022, p. 99). 

The Process

For this assignment I followed the four-part framework for digital writing as described by Lawrence (2023) (See Figure 1). I began by planning and then writing my script, all offline. The argument I wanted to make to my new audience is similar to the one presented by Turner and Hicks (2017), which is that I teach digital writing in the classroom because “digital writing can bring students incredible new opportunities for personal investment, sustained interest, and a life-long habit of writing” (p. 120). 

Figure 1

Next, I developed this argument, knowing that I needed to include evidence to support my claim. I worried that parents watching my video might misinterpret my argument about digital writing in the classroom, possibly assuming that “digital writing” translates to simply typing assignments or creating entertaining, yet meaningless, videos. To avoid this misconception, I decided to include visual examples of student work to demonstrate what the final product can look like.

 

I wanted the look of my design overall to be clean and simple, with a balance of mostly text, visuals, and voiceover. However, considering that my audience would be made up in part by students and their parents, I felt that including video of me talking would help establish ethos, the “most important component of rhetoric,” according to Aristotle (Lawrence, 2022, p. 17). To establish trust and credibility as a teacher, I want my students and their parents to be able to put a face and a name with the message. To accomplish this, I included video of me in the introductory and closing slides.

 

Strassman and O’Connell (n.d.) argue that one’s “motivation to fully engage in writing and revising text is sparked by [one’s] desire to communicate with the reader and by their individual pride of authorship,” and I found this to be true for me as I spent hours creating and editing my video (para. 5). Having never used Canva to create a presentation before, including four video recordings, five audio recordings, three visuals, one embedded video, and background music in my video was a bit ambitious. By the end, I had a new understanding of the advice provided by Questline Digital (2020): “If you need to produce and deliver a message quickly, it should come as no surprise that written content is the better choice” (para. 22). The timing of all the components was extremely difficult to perfect, and I finally had to accept my limitations as a novice content creator. One positive is that my struggle did give me insight into how my students likely feel when I assign them digital writing.

The Product

The Lesson

Overall, I learned a lot from the revision process and, possibly, could even admit to enjoying it. Digital writing will likely be no different from more traditional forms of writing: the more you practice, the easier it becomes, and the more likely you are to find your voice. As a teacher, I need to model and cultivate digital writing skills for my students, as this medium is becoming an increasingly common form of expression. Lawrence (2022) argues, “It is important to cultivate the skills of the visual and audio world . . . We are visual creatures as much as we are textual creatures. And on the web, text, visuals, and video interact with one another” (p. 108). As I revised my video, I asked myself, Who is my audience, and what do I want them to know? I’ll carry these questions into the classroom this year, keeping my focus on audience and purpose in all that we do.

References

 

Lawrence, D. (2022). Digital writing: A guide to writing for social media and the web. Broadview Press. 

 

Questline Digital. (2022, July 14). When to use video vs written content. https://www.questline.com/blog/when-to-use-video-vs-written-content/ 

 

Strassman, B. K., & O’Connell, T. (n.d.). Teaching tips: Authoring with video. Reading Rockets. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/curriculum-and-instruction/articles/teaching-tips-authoring-video 

 

Turner, K. H., & Hicks, T. (2017). Argument in the real world: Teaching adolescents to read and write digital texts. Heinemann.