What your writing thinks about your audience

You have a reader in mind. So does your text. But sometimes, the two don’t match.

Everything you write holds beliefs about its readers. I don’t mean the audience that you, the writer, might have in mind, that you shape your text for. I mean the audience that the text you’re producing imagines, with or without your intent.

Consider the mini-controversy over the food blog Thug Kitchen, one of whose taglines is “Welcome motherforkers,” and whose copy is full of lines like “Calm your bitch ass down like a boss.” Here’s some ad copy for their first cookbook:

The sum of the controversy was that Thug Kitchen is a couple of white people trying to sound black to sell stuff. There was, predictably, a backlash, and then, equally predictably, a backlash to the backlash. And while there’s too much going on with their writing to unpack now, let’s just extract one item: in the backlash to the backlash, a bunch of folks claimed that “thug” wasn’t especially associated with being black in the U.S. in the 21st century.

Which, like, take a moment to Google image search the word “thug.” Make sure you do some scrolling, because you’ll probably get a lot of images of the rapper Young Thug. But keep going. There is, you’ll notice, a pattern. Turns out there’s not a lot of diversity in who gets called a thug. Unless you count the white people trying to dress as “thugs,” i.e. trying to dress like they’re black. (And yes, it is true that the word originally has to do with religious zealots in India, but let’s not be naive about the context in which it’s used in Thug Kitchen.)

What’s happening here is that the Thug Kitchen bloggers imagine an audience who thinks all this is irreverent and playful and funny. But for lots of readers, the using “thug” in this way feels kind of ignorant and gross.

This illustrates a constraint that all writers should be thoughtful about. You hypothesize a reader and craft your writing accordingly. But then you send your writing out into the world, and people find stuff in it — attitudes, beliefs, assumptions — that you didn’t know about, let alone intend. That’s the thing about language: It has been around for a while. Readers already have relationships with the ideas and words we’re using. For them, our texts are speaking up in conversation that’s already been happening. Or, to reverse the perspective, as writers, we’re always coming on stage part way through the play. The characters have always already been moving around and yelling at each other and moving the plot forward.

Could the Thug Kitchen bloggers have done anything differently without sacrificing the irreverence they were going for? I tend to think yes. Avoid the word “thug” in your site’s title, for one. But beyond that, they could’ve done something more like what Colin Nissan does in his piece, “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers”:

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

Nissan’s text assumes that a profanity-laden monologue about seasonal decor is shocking and funny. Thug Kitchen is almost doing something similar: profanity-laden instructions for healthy eating. However, because the chunks of profanity largely originate in black culture — e.g. “shit is about to get real” and “calm your bitch ass down” — there’s an implication that a black voice talking about healthy food is especially funny.

Again, there’s too much to unpack to do it now. But the point is that readers have relationships with your texts that you might not have predicted, and those relationships might even be based on a better understanding of the language and ideas in your text than you had.

You can do a few things to avoid this. Ask another person to take a look, if you’re lucky enough to know someone willing to do that. Probably more important, every piece you write should be a little bit researched; what’s already been said about the most important words and ideas you’re writing about? You might also learn that your idea’s not quite as newfangled as you thought. This isn’t a great feeling, since it usually means more revision — but it can also push your writing further, maybe even into the realm of the genuinely new.