Author/Audience Relationship

Amanda Baggs’ writing definitely feels different than a lot of writer’s works. She is very blunt and straight-forward in her thoughts. She wants to share the honest truth with her readers. She also just wants to get her point across, so she does. She doesn't spend time trying to connect with her audience and make them like her. In fact, in many of her entries, she treats all of the audience as the same, as the people who she's angry with.  But she doesn't care about how her audience feels, she just wants to state her point and get her feelings across.  

In both the video and her blog, she comes across as confrontational towards the audience.  I think she does this because she feels that it is the only way people will listen to her and the only way that she will be able to get her point across.  If she just states things meekly, people won’t listen because the words are coming from “just an autistic person”.  However, by being confrontational towards her audience, she’s letting people know that she’s a human being too and she has feelings about these things just like any other person.  The confrontational tone also just stands out and catches the reader’s attention. Whether it makes the reader feel mad, confused, or sympathetic, it still makes the reader notice and feel something about her writing.  

Author Proposal

When this project was originally explained to us, I immediately thought of working with Diana Wynne Jones.  I would not say that she’s my favorite author, but I do really like her style.  As a fantasy writer, she does an excellent job of drawing her readers into the mystical worlds she creates. 

What’s interesting about DWJ is that while most of her books can be found in the Young Adult section, not all of her readers are young adults.  Her books attract even older adults and younger children to their pages.  Of course, DWJ does have a few books that are not classified as ‘Young Adult.’ However, her so-called “Children’s” books are still enjoyed by adults and vice versa.

So my main focus for this project is this: what is it about Diana Wynne Jones’ style or voice that makes her books popular with such a wide range of ages?  Most authors write to a particular age group and stick with that age. But there’s just something about DWJ’s writing that allows her to appeal to a much wider audience.

While trying to answer this question, I’m going to look into it two separate ways. I plan to read examples of her adult, young adult, and children’s books and try to see if her voice changes when writing for different genres.  I also plan to examine her specific style of writing in order to identify the techniques she uses to transcend audiences.  This will include looking at such aspects like her sentence structure and the persona she uses while writing.

I plan to also read similar genre books by other authors that may have a more specific age group as an audience.  Hopefully, this will give me an idea as to what DWJ does differently in her books to appeal to a more age-varied audience.

Finally, DWJ often shared her thoughts on her writing style.  I’m going to try to find any interviews she may have given about why she chooses the genres she does.  What did she think about publishing books in multiple genres?  Did she purposely write to appeal to a wider age range? And if so, how did she think she went about it? What did she think her techniques were?  I don’t know if she ever answered these questions (she died last year, unfortunately) but I plan to try to find her thoughts on this topic.

Chaos VS Simplicity VS Femininity

Upon visiting the Pepsi, IKEA, and Dove websites, I had one definite conclusion: all three sites are extremely different. They each obviously have very different audiences that they are trying to reach.  Whether their attempts are successful, I don’t know.

The first site I opened was the Pepsi one. My first thought? Ooohhh, pretty colors. Followed by: what the heck is going on here?  Pepsi’s home page is a covered in different, brightly colored boxes.  It’s all crammed together and feels very chaotic. Just looking at the home page alone, I have to wonder, does this marketing strategy actually work?  While there are various Pepsi logos spread across the page, most of the page is taken up with the colored boxes with Tweets about X-Factor. Someone searching for information about the product itself has to go digging deeper into the site.  The bright colors and use of popular media indicates that the intended audience is for teenagers through young adults, but would these people be interested in the product behind X-Factor? Because it seems to me, this site is promoting X-Factor more than trying to sell Pepsi. I’m sure there’s some kind of brilliant marketing strategy behind this. Maybe the “You like this? We like that too!” strategy.

I visited the IKEA site next. It has a totally different feeling than Pepsi.  My first thought was that it looked a lot like the set up of Amazon or EBay. It actually seems to be trying to sell products, rather than just promote itself through popular media.  With the bright but still plain colors, I’m guessing the intended audience is older than Pepsi’s.  It’s not too old though, since some of the products on the home page appeal to me.  I noticed that on the big picture of various products, there are some fun patterns on pillows and lampshades.  This suggests that while the intended audience is older than teenagers, college students and other young adults may still be included.  The fonts and layouts are also very simplistic and much easier to follow than the pure chaos of the Pepsi page.

Finally, I checked out the Dove page, which feels like the middle ground between Pepsi and IKEA. Like IKEA, Dove also shows some of their products on the home page. However, the site also seems less product based like the Pepsi site.  For example, there are sections for tips, videos, and games.  While Pepsi and IKEA’s intended audience was for any gender, Dove is clearly geared towards women.  The whites and simple colors of the site (plus the large picture of a woman) only emphasize this fact.  They do have some products for men but the advertisement still says ‘your football fan.’  Dove is also very simplistic compared to the busy-ness of the Pepsi site.  

Hemingway Takes on a Blog

My first thought after reading both A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and the Smitten Kitchen blog was that the difference in time periods was very obvious.  Other than the very modern “canvas” of the Smitten Kitchen blog, the style just has a much more modern feel than Hemingway’s story.   One thing that really stuck out to me (and probably due to our recent reading) was the use of commas, parentheses and other punctuation. The blog uses these throughout the entire thing. It gives it that modern feel while also making it very light and conversational.  While the sentences were shorter and more broken up with punctuation, it made it extremely easy to read. I could hear the author speaking to me rather than just writing.

Hemingway is the complete opposite of the Smitten Kitchen blog.  While the content seems very simple, it’s still written in a much “heavier” way than the blog.  Unlike the author of the blog, Hemingway doesn't use a lot of punctuation. It’s not grammatically incorrect like some works by “big foot stylists”; Hemingway still uses commas. However, he doesn’t use them in the conversational way that the blog did.  Some sentences just feel long and draggy. The language itself has a slower feeling to it than the language used in the blog. The entire piece definitely feels much older and less colorful than the Smitten Kitchen blog.  Even so, this simplistic way of writing seems to work well for the piece.