Exploring Tools, Places, and Ways of Being: Audience Matters for Developing Writers

This chapter explores how writers respond to interactions with readers and audience members in two technology-mediated writing contexts: a Hunger Games fan’s use of FanFiction.net and a classroom using Scholar to write original narrative texts. The authors look across the two spaces to analyze similarities in how the technology is used to foster interaction with readers and develop writers’ craft through these interactions. In particular, they analyze how writing functions in each space as a tool, a place, and a way of being. By considering the affordances of these two contexts, the authors argue that technology is changing how we write and learn to write, in and out-of-school, by connecting writers with an audience that can significantly shape their goals, skills, and processes.