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Circulating your work doesn't just refer to your polished final drafts, but it also refers to works in progress -- collaborating with others can be one of our most effective tools for composition. Refer to the "Strengthening Your Writing Practice" section of this guide for more about peer review and other collaborative revision strategies.
It is vital to assess your work for accessibility if you plan to share it with others. Ensuring that your texts are designed for audiences with hearing, visual, physical, and cognitive differences in mind will allow you to reach these audiences equitably.
Developing accessible materials is highly contextual, but there are many excellent resources for learning about one's options here -- we've linked to several below.
Working in digital and audiovisual media is a good opportunity to remember that your compositions can have a life beyond the classroom (if you want them to have one). Texts can be shared and spread to different audiences more easily than ever before. This can be a little scary -- we should also remember that it is okay for our texts to remain with very small audiences, even just ourselves -- but it can also be exciting and empowering. You have agency to make your voice heard!
You should keep in mind your rights and your options in protecting your writing and ideas if you choose to circulate any texts that you've created. Copyright is a complex legal framework, but educating yourself about different choices you can make for others to interact with your work is important.
One helpful resource are Creative Commons licenses, which are a way to clearly stipulate how others may potentially use or adapt your published work. (For example, the UConn Library LibGuides are published with a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which explains that you can redistribute or adapt any of our original materials as long as we are given credit and the materials are not used for a commercial purpose.)
Be sure to explore your options for publishing your work!
You likely completed a good deal of audience analysis at different stages of the composition process -- in developing an inquiry and creating research strategies, engaging with the perspectives found in that research, and considering stakeholders and rhetorical strategies. This work continues through the publication and sharing phases as well. Just as you want to find out where voices relevant to your work have been shared in the past, you want to find where and how to share your voice into the future.
Many web platforms and services have their own tracking and analytic tools built in to facilitate the work of seeing how people are engaging with your writing and brainstorming ways to potentially expand its reach. MassMine is one stand-alone tool that can be used for such digital data collection in various contexts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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