Sharing your work with readers is an exciting and important stage of the writing process. Ultimately, you cannot determine if a document is successful until you share it with your readers and gauge their reactions. Reaching significant readers and helping them understand your thoughts on an issue can be remarkably satisfying. Thanks to the Internet and powerful software tools, you can professionally present your work. Knowing that readers will make opinions regarding your ability to think and communicate, you want to ensure that your published work represents your best effort. Even work published on an Internet site should be carefully crafted. Remember that tools such as the Way Back Machine exist, which can immortalize your words in digital archives. Before publishing a work, always take a moment to reflect on its quality, ensuring the work represents your best effort.

Publishing can be defined as any act that involves making your work public:

• Publishing may refer to reading your paper out loud to other people.

• Publishing may refer to sharing texts with a group of peers in school via photocopying and distribution of a hard copy of your work, or in an electronic format such as an email attachment to friends.

• Publishing may refer to the traditional author-publishing context, whereby the author submits a text to a publishing company; the text is reviewed and accepted or rejected. Often, authors are encouraged to revise and resubmit. After the text is developed and accepted for publication, the publisher prints the work and markets it. The author then receives royalties based on sales. In this model, a text (such as a journal article or book) may take years to actually arrive in bookstores.

• Publishing may refer to publishing work online. Thanks to the Internet and numerous new online writing forums, (such as blogs or wikis), you can reach hundreds, perhaps thousands (even millions) of readers, even though your work is not supported by an institution or association.

• Publishing may involve an interactive forum where the author and reader exist in a dialectical relationship. Thanks to the Internet and Web publishing tools, our conception of publishing is becoming more dynamic. Authors can publish a version on the Web, readers can immediately respond, using discuss tools, email, online forums, and the writer can then revise.

Opponents of public writing claim that the aforementioned forums, except for the traditional author-publishing context, are too public. They voice concerns about intellectual property, copyright infringement, and idea snatching. These traditionalists are at risk of being labelled outdated or even paranoid and even worse, missing out on helpful opportunities to receive valuable feedback from peers. In our technological age, we should take full advantage of our ability to email a draft to a few colleagues in hopes of receiving helpful feedback. We should be proud and confident to submit our scholarship to public writing spaces such as wikis and blogs. Every writer knows that audience reaction and participation is a valuable part of the writing process and public writing spaces offer vast audiences access to our work. We should utilize these spaces to reach these audiences.

Resources

• Public Writing Spaces
• Morgan's Dangers of Blogging Links
• Current Readings on Public Writing Issues
Hi! Welcome to Writing Wiki. Below are links to my wiki articles, homepages, and public writing sites.
12/25/2006 9:05:39 AM - CAS-moxley