A Blog For All People

At the end of last month, the Mum Network Bloggers Club had its first Twitter chat, led by the lovely Leoarna. We covered a lot of ground and I felt like I got to know fellow club members a lot better as a result. If you weren't able to join in, there'll be another one soon, so watch this space!

Among the many things we covered two questions particularly struck a chord. The first was about finding a voice or, in fact, whether we even needed a unique blogging voice. The second was about our audience. For me these two things are intimately related.

My life involves a lot of talking and writing and I am acutely aware that different audiences for my musings, for what they're worth, expect and need different things from me. Let me be clear, I'm not talking about talking down to people. (That is one of my biggest pet hates and try it on with me at your peril, medical professionals.) I talk to my kids in a not very dissimilar way to the way I talk to my MA students, colleagues or friends. I write a public lecture (note to self: you have to write that blooming public lecture you've been putting off…) differently from a conference keynote. It's not that one audience is more or less smart or serious than the other, it's just I can expect them to know different things and it's got to be right to take that into account.

So, if I talk to a bunch of academics about Jane Austen, for example, I can expect them to know most of what's been written about her and her novels for the past 200 years. If I give a public lecture on her, on the other hand, I am often talking to people who live and breathe the books more fully than any academic I know, but who don't necessarily care much for the criticism surrounding it. And why should they? If I talk to Sissyboo (my 5-year-old) about Pride and Prejudice, on the third hand I wish I had, well … that's another matter entirely. She needs to have explained to her why someone as clever and funny as Lizzy Bennet would marry pompous old Darcy. (It's all about the house, Sissyboo. The big, shiny, portrait laden house. Being mistress of somewhere like Pemberley is a huge deal in the 1810s, love. I’m telling you.)

I think I've learned to be pretty good at getting roughly the right register for different audiences. It took a long time and a lot of thought to get there. But with blogging, I realised during the Twitter chat, I don't really think about audience all that much. Partly, I realised, it's because I can't.

You see, I don't really know who you guys are. I know people read the blog, and it thrills and amazes me daily that that's the case. Some of you, I've have come to know, in a sense, through Twitter, Facebook and the wonderful comments people leave on the blog. But I get a lot more views than comments. Who in the heck are you all? I'd love to know.

Or would I? I actually find it incredibly liberating writing for an audience I can't see. Your anonymity like my own leaves me free to just be me, warts and all. And I love that. Setting up the blog has been one of the best decisions I have ever made. A place to be me, as I said in my last post.

But is that enough? Well yes, mostly, it is. I blog for two reasons: first, to see if I can help others through my experiences of having Boo prematurely and raising two kids (one with disabilities); and second, to help myself by articulating these experiences. I am not overly concerned about stats or rankings or the numbers of followers I have, but when these figures move in the right direction it's nice of course.

But...There's always a but, isn’t there? I do have secret (OK, not secret now) aspirations to be seen as a blogger rather than a particular kind of blogger. I have found myself describing the blog lately as special interest or nichey, simply by virtue of the fact that I blog about the effects of events that, mercifully, don't affect all that many families. I am lucky enough to have been welcomed with open arms by wonderful and well established bloggers in the premmie or even bigger US preemie blogging communities and by the fabulous SEN bloggers whose posts inspire me on a daily basis. I want to belong to these communities. They make me feel at home and have become so important in my life. I am not apologetic about the special(ist) focus of my blog at all.

Labels make me slightly anxious, though, even more now since having Boo. Just as I argue daily with people that they shouldn't see my son as the sum of his disabilities but as the wonderful human being he is becoming, so I want people to know that there is more to my life than prematurity and special needs (dominating forces in our lives though they are).

First and foremost, I am me (messed up and conflicted though I often am). And I had a life before this; I was a parent before this. I am raising an older, healthy, neurotypical girl as well, and she is part of the blog too. Sure, I have to think about things and use words now I never even knew about before, but I still use the same language. I'm still me.

And there's a part of me that really hopes that some readers of my blog might come to it not because they are looking for others' experiences of prematurity, cerebral palsy or infantile spasms (the three search terms people mostly find my blog through). I hope I can speak to people outside the communities I've nestled up in, partly to support the good work of other premmie and SEN bloggers do in getting our experiences out there and making our kids and their lives more visible. I also hope I can do this because I really do feel that deep down I'm not so different from the majority of parents of young kids, although my life sometimes looks that way.

It's because of these aspirations that I was so very pleased that the lovely Actually Mummy has twice (to my knowledge) mentioned Premmeditations in posts as a blog with 'universal' appeal. (Just in case you smell a rat, I have never met her and hadn’t read her wonderful blog until I started my own.) I'm not sure whether the stats (if there was a way of analysing them) would bear her claims out, but the suggestion that this might be true means an awful lot to me on so many different levels.

So over to you. I'd really be curious to know what you think about blogs and audiences. Do you know who your readers are? Do you target widely or aim at a particular group of readers? Or of your a reader of blogs, rather than a blogger, do you stick to blogs on certain topics (craft, pregnancy, parenting etc.)? Or do you cast your (Inter)net widely? Bottom line, I'm wondering if it is realistic or desirable to attempt to write a blog for all readers at all. I’m not sure, but I haven’t given up on it just yet.

This article is a feature from the MUM.com Trusted Bloggers Club.

About the author

Mr Boos Mum

Call me Mrboosmum. I'm a thirty-something mum to 5-year-old Sissyboo and 1-year-old Mr Boo, born at 29 weeks. When I'm not parenting, blogging, advocating for families affected by prematurity or disability, or masquerading as a physio, I'm busy with my other day job as an academic.

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