4.5 Reflecting on Public Writing for Social Change
Jackie Hendricks; Amy Lueck; Loring Pfeiffer; and Maura Tarnoff
Reflecting on Public Writing for Social Change
When Holmes is writing for a public audience, she often reflects on her favorite passage from Peter Mortensen’s “Going Public”: “we must go public. And we can” (182). Mortensen is asking writing studies researchers to write for increasingly public audiences “outside the profession, beyond the academy” (182); he’s asking his colleagues to embrace the role of “public intellectual” that Holmes mentioned at the start of this essay. What Holmes loves about the line is how it communicates in just a few words the necessity, urgency, and possibility that come with public writing. Whether someone is a university researcher used to writing to other researchers or a first-year college student used to writing only for your teachers, writing for public audiences and in public genres can seem daunting. However, as Mortensen reminds us, we must go public.
As academic citizens of the world, we have a responsibility to ourselves and to the publics around us to use writing to improve our communities and address injustices. Not every piece of writing that goes public will change the world, and we often do not get to see an immediate impact; indeed, the kind of social change that addresses deep injustices often takes time and far-reaching efforts beyond a single email or blog post, but these small rhetorical acts can begin to gather momentum and move toward change in small steps.
When you arrive at your graduation day, Holmes hopes you will recall what it means to be an academic citizen. Listen for the moment just before the commencement speaker instructs you to move your tassel from the right to the left. They will confer your degree and say: “with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities appertaining thereto.” In the celebration of your accomplishments, remember that obtaining a higher education is a privilege that comes with responsibilities to your community and society. Being an academic citizen simply means using your education for good in the world, and public writing can help you accomplish those goals.
Pulling It All Together
Now that you have spent some time thinking about the communicative needs and possibilities related to your public issue, it’s time to compose your response.
Task: This assignment will have two parts: 1) a statement of goals and objectives that identifies the rhetorical situation your composition speaks to, including the purpose, the audience, and how your choice of media, modality, style, and other compositional choices were made in response to that situation; and 2) the composition itself, which should be composed using any appropriate media/modality to suit your purposes and reach your audience.
Purpose: This assignment allows you to bring together the skills and ideas you learned across the preceding four modules in a multimodal composition of your own.
Steps:
- Review your answers to the prompts from the “Planning Your Public Rhetorical Situation” activity from Chapter 4.2. Finalize your plans for your public writing. The revised answers to these questions will serve as a draft of your statement of goals and objectives.
Attribution
“Reflecting on Public Writing for Social Change” by Jackie Hendricks, Amy Lueck, Loring Pfeiffer, and Maura Tarnoff is adapted from “Public Writing for Social Change” by Ashley J. Holmes, used under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 with special permission from the author. “Conclusion” is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
