A while back, I took an academic and professional writing class. It’s called Little Red Schoolhouse, and it’s one of the most famous classes at the university. Every week, we would submit a writing assignment based on a new prompt. Within that prompt, we could write about whatever field we wanted, but there was a catch. Before every assignment, we had to submit a reader’s statement. The reader’s statement was a paragraph summarizing the knowledge, background, and goals of the reader. Ideally, our submission would match the kind of writing best suited for our expected reader. Every decision we made about our writing, from jargon to pacing to structure, had to be made to the benefit of the reader described in the statement.
I never wrote for the reader in the statement.
The purpose of a reader statement is to describe the audience of your work, but in this class, the statement never actually described my readers. My real readers were my peers and my lector. They are my true audience, and I understand that I must write for my audience. Of course, I wasn’t just writing for my peers and lectors. There was far more context to consider, so I needed to keep that in mind. Whenever I wrote a reader statement, I would always construct a different one in my head:
The readers are students and a lector in the Little Red Schoolhouse class. They know we have covered content on […] and […]. They have read my previous assignments. They know the purpose of this assignment is to […]. Also, they just read the reader’s statement about people who […], so they will be putting themselves in the shoes of that particular audience. They care that I meet […] objectives in the context of […] readers, and will be evaluating the following piece of writing as such.
That was my real reader’s statement. Actually, that was everyone’s real reader’s statement; they just didn’t know it. Our audiences were not hypothetical readers invented in our minds. They were writing students and lectors. Using this framework, I would properly craft my submitted reader’s statement and writing assignment to match. My grades were phenomenal, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Though my previous writing experience likely influenced this, that multi-layered reader’s statement formed an undeniably effective framework for my assignments.
In some ways, I may appear to have subverted the course, but looking back, I learned the lesson even better this way. I wasn’t inventing readers for the sake of an assignment. I was actively studying my real audience and writing specifically for them. Having learned this lesson, I try to apply it whenever I write, but there’s one place I just haven’t studied my readers: here. I have no clue what you, the reader, want to read. I don’t know how you found me or why you read my work. To be clear, I’m eternally grateful, but I want to write for you, the audience. Right now, I’m just writing for myself. If you found this website, then you can probably find me, online or in person, so please do. Tell me who you are, why you read what I write, and what you’re looking for.
Or don’t, that’s fine too. I’ll keep shouting into the void, just in case you’re still listening.