Who’s your inner reader?

The blogs I read run the gamut: tech, productivity, personal finance, humor, writing, personal journals. Each of them makes certain assumptions about the audience: that they have a certain level of technological savviness; that they’re employed, established in their career, and can afford health insurance and saving for retirement; and that the things suggested aren’t already being done.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with these assumptions. Everyone has an imagined inner reader, and dumbing down a topic to the “This is how you check your email” level will alienate the computer whizzes who read the blog. Doing the exact opposite will do the same thing, but with the people who only know what a blog is because some savvy relative set it as the home page.

So who’s my inner reader? A glance at my front page shows a variety of topics: Script Frenzy, Blippy, WTF-worthy moments in my life, thoughts on reality television, and more. If I were filtering by all of these criteria, my inner reader is a writer who enjoys random musings and social media. That’s a small subset of all English-reading Internet users who will read this site at all, much less read regularly.

Should I be writing for people, though? Should you? That’s a personal question. I write for myself because writing is what I do. Despite sitting here for awhile before figuring out something to write about, I throw something on this page and hit submit every day, no matter the quality. This site is much more an exercise in writing about things besides myself than anything else. It can be cleaned up later, right?

You can make up your own mind, though.