Can’t Public Writing be About Anything?

The short answer to that question is yes. The longer answer is also yes, but with one slight tweak: it can be about anything, but should it be?

If you’re going to invest the time, energy, and cognitive bandwidth to enter into public discussions or debates and put pen to paper (metaphorically), then it seems like choosing an issue or topic that is worthy of all that work would be a good idea.

The question of whether something is “worthy” or important enough for public discussion – and for you to take your time to write about it – will have different answers for everyone. Take a look at the internet: there are thousands of articles, essays, tweets, posts, etc, about any number of different topics. There are blogs/websites dedicated to professional football, college football, manga, anime, pro wrestling, reality television, and K-Pop. While you might not think that some (or any) of those topics are worth having a discussion over, there are many, many, many people who would disagree with you.

(Go ahead, take a minute and Google any one of those topics and see how many results you get.)

Choosing a good topic/issue for your public writing is the first step in the process of producing something that is effective, impactful, and adds something to the public discourse. But how do you go about doing that? Let’s remember what makes something public writing:

1. It has a potentially wide audience.
2. It’s about something that is up for public debate.

Those two criteria can help you narrow down the field. But let’s add in two more:

1. It matters to you – it’s something relevant to your experience or interests.
2. It’s “of the time” – in other words, it’s something that matters right now, something that is a part of the moment we’re in.

Adding in those additional criteria can narrow your choices a bit more. But when it comes to public writing, there’s one more concept you should consider: exigence.

Right, Exigence. Um… What Is That?

Exigence is a fancy term for the reason or the motivation behind your writing. If you remember the concept of the rhetorical situation from a previous chapter, the exigence is part of that. Lloyd Bitzer, a rhetorician who wrote extensively about discourse communities and rhetorical situations described exigence this way:

Any exigence is an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a
defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which
is other than it should be.

I’m sure that quote clears everything up for you. To put Bitzer’s thoughts in simpler language, an exigence is the urgency to change something, the reason or need to engage in the discussion or conversation, the existence of some part/aspect of the issue that demands or calls you to respond in some way in order to make some sort of change.

So, in a nutshell, exigence is the reason or the motivation – the purpose – behind why someone would engage in any kind of discussion, conversation or debate. Or, in our case, in any kind of public writing.

For most students, the exigence that motivates your writing is a simple one: your teacher told you to. It’s an assignment and you need to do it in order to get a good grade. At some point in your high school career, you most likely had to write an essay about a piece of literature and there’s probably a pretty good chance that you didn’t really care about that book, poem, or play for any reason other than you had a grade riding on it.

(I had to write a three page essay on The Great Gatsby in high school and trust me, I didn’t care about that book then or now.)

Public writing doesn’t involve an assignment or a grade as an exigence. The purposes behind the kinds of public writing that focus on issues up for debate or that have societal/cultural impact are often more personal, ideological, and timely (spurred on by the moment.) That kind of exigence/purpose helps to connect the public writing to the public and that potentially wider audience, whereas an assignment or a grade is a much more limited and narrow audience and reason.

A more public or societal exigence can give you, as a writer, a way to frame your writing – even if it’s about a very personally relevant or individually significant topic – in a context that can connect your topic to a greater audience. For example, a student with family who were recent immigrants to the U.S. might connect to recent issues with ICE and deportations, tying their own experiences to a larger energizing event, one with urgency for multiple audiences.

Finding the connections that may exist between your own personal interests/’passion projects’ and timely, relevant, and urgent public issues or debates allows you to meet Bitzer’s “requirement” for a public response by framing a personal issue as one that necessitates discussion in order for it to be solved, fixed, or changed.