Resources

Re-Drafting – Writing for Your Reader

Once you feel you have worked out your thoughts to create a fairly well-formulated argument/discussion that you feel addresses your assigned task and expressses your ideas, you will need to “test” them again by shifting your attention to your reader. This process includes reviewing your writing to make sure it is organized and presented in ways that will meet the needs of your readers, who expect a clear, well-organized, well-supported, piece of writing they can read and understand easily.

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

You can usually visualize your audience as a meber of your class who is basically familiar with the subject matter/discipline, but does not know what you are trying to say about it, as they cannot read your mind. However, sometimes an instructor will ask you to address your writing to a particular audience: for example you might be asked to write a recommendation to a school board about the best policy to adopt in its schools regarding a certain issue. In cases like this, you will need to put yourself in the place of the assigned 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. If you have any questions about this kind of “assigned audience”, be sure to ask your instructor for clarification.

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

Creating Meaning

As you develop your sentences into paragraphs and make progress in considering how well these will be understood by your audience, a valuable question to ask yourself is “Why does this matter?” Effective writing helps the reader understand how the ideas, issues and arguments discussed relate to each other and why they are important. Since readers can only read what is on the page and not in your mind, you will need to make sure you have answered their “why does this matter” questions fully and effectively.

Learning to see your writing through your reader’s eyes can be difficult and takes practice. Once you are fairly satisfied with your draft it can be helpful to step back and forget about it for a day or two; doing so can provide you with the distance you need to view the writing more objectively from your reader’s perspective.

Logical Flow

Providing your reader with signals that clarify the logic and organization of your paper is essential to producing reader-friendly writing that is easy to read and understand.

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

Another way to improve clarity is to choose more meaningful verbs than “states” or “says” to introduce quotation from authors. For example, “Jones claims that…,” “Stevenson speculates that…,” “Levesque concedes that…” and “Singh disputes that…” all help your reader understand the position the author takes and the way in which it relates the ideas being discussed in your assignment.