12 “Public Writing for Social Change”
Ashley J. Holmes
Overview
This essay challenges students to use public writing to embrace their role as an “academic citizen” (i.e., someone who takes the writing and research we do in college and puts it to practical and civic use in our communities in the hopes of contributing toward positive social change).* Beginning with invention and how to find an exigent public issue, the chapter moves students through important steps of planning to write for a public rhetor- ical situation, such as defining and researching a public audience, genre of writing, and context for eventual publication or circulation. The essay provides a brief introduction to public sphere theories to help students move beyond thinking of their audience in public writing as “the general public” and instead embrace a more specific audience within the multiplicity of publics for their writing. With examples from a broad range of genres and styles that fall under the umbrella of public writing, the essay offers support for more traditional public writing assignments (e.g., the op-ed or letter to a representative), as well as digital or multimodal assignments (e.g., blogs, social media campaigns, or digital stories).
Can a tweet—a genre of public writing—cause social change? There’s an article I like to teach by Malcom Gladwell that explores this question. In “Small Change: Why the Revolution Won’t Be Tweeted,” Gladwell recounts the story of four freshmen from North Caro- lina A&T who sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in 1960, sparking a series of sit-ins and protests. Being skeptical of the impact of social media, Gladwell reminds us that all the events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s “happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.” On one hand, Gladwell’s critiques may be warranted when we think about isolated instances of what some people call “clicktivism” or “slacktivism”—things like clicking a “like” button, changing a profile picture’s frame to support a cause, or signing an online petition. On the other hand, Gladwell wrote this article in 2010, and we have since witnessed the power of groups to use social media and online tools to organize broader movements, such as Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and many others.
While just one tweet or letter to the editor isn’t going to lead to sweep- ing social change by itself, using public writing to respond to the exigences of our current times can help us tap into networks that may advance a cause one step at a time. As Julius Bailey and David Leonard note in their study of the Black Lives Matter movement: “The expressions of black love, the creation of spaces of protest, the demands for justice that follow, each can gather momentum and spread to become large-scale social movements that can no longer be ignored” (emphasis added, 77). Sometimes public writing can be a small snowflake contributing to the momentum of a growing snowball, but it can just easily melt without hav