There was an interesting quote that came up I someone’s presentation this week. And though I had been taking notes to put into the TAG discussion feed, this one I saved to my own notes: “When a person is writing a letter. They become conscious and aware of another person, which in tern influences word choice, word order, even the punctuation and sentence structure.”
The presentation focused on the psychology of letters, so this can explain why people wrote the way they did. This explains the trends of optimism from letters of people who were in really dark and hopeless places. They remained optimistic because they knew someone was reading their letters and imagining their circumstances. And more obvious, the letters we read were mostly informal, because they were written between families. The love letters especially had high traces of giddiness and aloofness.
Likewise, I noticed this concept of a ‘reader’ effecting the way we write goes for other pieces of writing. We spell and grammar check three times over because we know someone is going to grade our papers. We can change the tone of our papers to cater to whomever is the target audience/reader. I think it was just very interesting that this quote took the idea of a reader being totally outside of the work and turned readers into a present force on the writer’s mind, making the reader more involved than originally thought.
