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Your Reader

At some point you must begin to shift your attention to your reader. You must concern yourself with organizing the writing you have done so that it will meet the purposes of your reader.

For this type of revision, it may help to imagine a hypothetical reader. Imagining how this person would respond to what you have written will help you decide what you need to say to establish the context for your discussion and to be convincing about your main points.

Sometimes an instructor will specify a particular audience as an aspect of the assignment. For example, writing a recommendation to a school board about the best policy to adopt in its schools regarding a certain issue. In cases like this put yourself in the place of the hypothetical audience and consider the questions they are likely to have, the information they need and the kind of arguments that they are likely to find convincing.

spark Click on the sections below to learn more about addressing the needs of your reader for clarity and significance.

Clarity

It is particularly important to provide your reader with signals that clarify the logic and organization of your paper.

One of the most useful strategies is to think about appropriate transitional words and phrases. For example, words such as “therefore,” “however,” “moreover,” “in other words” and “for example” help your reader see the relationships among your ideas as you present them.

There are also many different verbs of attribution that can be used to indicate to your reader what positions are taken by the people you quote in your essay. For example, “Jones claims that…,” “Stevenson speculates that…,” “Levesque concedes that…” and “Plesa disputes that…” all help your reader understand the relation of the authors to the ideas being discussed.

Look closely at your sentences and paragraphs to determine other ways they might be made more reader-friendly.

Make sure that the words you’ve chosen are as precise as possible, so as to convey exactly what you mean.

Check for any unnecessary repetitions, so as to avoid boring or confusing your reader.

Significance

As you develop your sentences into paragraphs and make progress in considering how well these will be understood by your audience, you will have the essence of a first draft of the body of the essay. A valuable question to ask at this point is “So what?” A good essay will help the reader understand why the ideas, issues and arguments discussed there actually matter. Try to make sure you have an answer in your essay for the reader who asks the so-what question.

Learning to see your writing through someone else’s eyes is difficult and takes practice. A helpful tactic, once you have a draft with which you are fairly satisfied, is to step back and forget about it for a day or two; the distance gained allows you a better chance of viewing the paper more objectively and from the perspective of another reader.

No matter what hypothetical audience you have, it is still the case that your instructor will read and mark the essay. Therefore, be sure that you have read the assignment information carefully and clarified the instructor’s expectations. And in case of uncertainty, speak to your instructor about how you should imagine your audience.