Rutkowski 2011.pdf

Rutkowski 12the time because my high school education led up to this expectation and I was alreadycomfortable with the style. I realize that one of the most important lessons a writer can learn isability to adapt to their audience. It’s a lesson that I have been taught indirectly by my motherwho wrote for a living as a consultant. Her training had been technical, and she always correctedmy papers in high school before I turned them in. She taught me about structure and how toorganize my ideas logically, and to write in the impersonal third person. By her example, I hadlearned that writing is important no matter the discipline and for the effective communication ofideas. This was my first lesson, I now realize, in the importance of audience. While the words‘audience’ and ‘expectations’ were not used in my mother’s discussions of my papers, she did infact help me grasp the language of the professional world, and it perhaps prepared me the mostfor my academic career. I didn’t have to change my style in the early years of my collegeeducation because I had already acquired the language necessary to succeed. However, when Ichanged majors, it reaffirmed the lesson of what I can only now explicitly call awareness ofaudience. One of the greatest tools a writer can learn is the ability to adapt to the expectations ofthe expected audience. It is not at all different from a film director who works within a genreand utilizes genre expectations to get a reaction an audience educated in its form.The importance of audience expectation extends across all disciplines. As a teenager Iplayed piano, sometimes competitively, and as I came closer to graduating from high school Ihad to audition for placement in higher education. As it turns out, different professors of musichave different opinions about how Sergei Rachmaninoff should be played, and it was helpfulwhen my own private instructor happened to know someone on the panel I would be playing for.Some people like a heavy use of the pedals to give that deep, romantic sound of iconic Russiancomposers; others simply expect a cleaner interpretation. Even my grandmother understood it