What Is Public Writing?

There are a lot of different possible definitions for “public writing.” The most obvious – since it’s part of the name – is that it is writing that is public, in other words it’s not writing that is done in private, only for the writer themselves, or for a limited audience such as an instructor. Academic writing, the form of writing students are most familiar with, is typically not public. Think about the essays and other forms of writing you’ve done in school. Most of the time, you shared those with your teacher, maybe a classmate or two, or – in some specific cases – with the entire class, either as something you read aloud or something you turned into a presentation.

While sharing your writing in those ways can feel like it’s public (and comes with the associated anxiety and/or fear), that’s not really what public writing is. To really qualify as ‘public’, writing needs to meet two criteria:

1. It needs to be shared with a potentially wide audience, something beyond just the teacher or a couple of people.
2. It’s about a topic that is up for public debate, something that people are discussing or having conversations about as it has some sort of societal/community relevance and impact.

Historically (so, you know, back in the day), public writing was a very common form of discourse (conversation) and a way for individual people or small groups to make their voice heard. Before the internet and social media, public writing required more effort and intentionality.

If we take a brief field trip back in time to the beginning of America, we encounter three of the most famous examples of public writing: the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and The Federalist Papers. Remember that in the late 1700s, there was no internet, no email, no texting, no YouTube, and no Twitter (just imagine the tweets that might have been sent if Twitter existed during the Revolutionary War) so public writing was more limited, often coming in the form of pamphlets and essays that were published in newspapers.

The Federalist Papers was a collection of such essays – eighty-five of them, to be precise – that were published in newspapers throughout New York State (there’s the potentially wide audience.) These essays were written to encourage the public to vote in favor of ratifying (approving) the newly written Constitution (and there’s the topic up for public debate.) In an era before television, when there was no way to air sixty-second political commercials, this kind of public writing was the most common way to gather public support on any issue.

Coming back to the present, you might recognize that The Federalist Papers have become such a significant piece of public writing in American history that they were even part of the Hamilton musical, as Alexander Hamilton wrote fifty-one of the eighty-five essays, a massive bit of public writing work that still impacts our society, culture, and laws over two-hundred years later.

In 2026, public writing has taken on entirely new dimensions and formats. The local public square which was often the center where public writing was shared aloud and publicly debated, has gone global – Twitter, BlueSky, Facebook, and Reddit are among the new hubs of debate – and the state wide audiences of Hamilton’s time now span the entire world, reaching anyone with an internet connection. Anyone can create their own blog, website, or YouTube channel and sites such as Medium and Substack provide a forum for anyone willing to write. Whether or not that’s a good thing is still questionable.

I mean, have you spent five minutes on Twitter, lately? If there was ever an example of why we might have been better off when we couldn’t hear everyone’s opinion, that’s it.

The evils and dangers of social media aside, the advent of the internet and the ways in which it has made public writing easier to share than ever also means that there are more opportunities for you to engage in discussions and conversations, to learn from others with different perspectives, and to contribute your voice and experiences, to make yourself heard.

And that is what public writing is all about.