I really enjoyed Clive Thompson's discussion of public writing in the "Digital School" chapter of Smarter Than You Think. It's really interesting how the high school students described in the book treated writing in an online public forum completely differently than writing a paper for a teacher's eyes only. The most compelling difference for me was the ownership the students took over their writing when they knew it could be read by the public.

How does writing (and/or designing) for a public audience affect what you say, how you think about your work and what difference it might make?
When writing
for an audience, you tend to write leaning towards what you think your audience wants to read, The difference it makes it that you may write very differently according to who you are writing for. For example, I would write a very different short story for my brother versus writing for my English Professor. The type of words used would be different, the length and depth would all be very different. Writing for an audience

The chapter "Digital School" in Thompson's book, Smarter Than You Think is all too real for all of us in this class right now. I found myself relating to this chapter in pretty much every different situation that Thompson was talking about. Take the example that he used to bring up that teachers must now teach how to find creditable sources. The students always choose the first few links in a Google search even though they were wildly uncredited. I must say that I am guilty of doing this and am an avid user of Wikipedia which is known to be misguided sometimes.

Who are you writing to?

This question goes hand-in-hand with that of what content one is writing, though Clive Thompson says the audience is often overlooked by writers and not pondered enough.

Said Thompson: "These are acts of self-awareness that professional writers struggle with: forming a theory of mind of one's audience, the better to communicate with it."

To be honest, I love this book. “Smarter than You Think” addresses key problems and situations in our society that focuses on the move towards a technological future. With regards to writing for a public audience, I think that having that extra pressure encourages me to do better with my work. When we write to just turn into our professor, the pressure to perform well is there, but less. Writing for a public audience is scary, and also adds another aspect to writing: interest.