HOW TO
Writing is a nerve-wracking and enthralling endeavor. We put a great deal of ourselves into it. Sometimes we torture ourselves, or hope to liberate and comfort ourselves. But what about those whom we expect to read our writing? Writing is both an extremely personal experience and one that connects us to untold others. That connection is what it is really about. Indeed, from the reader’s perspective, we are too often frustrated by the author’s lack of consideration: the text may be too long, obscure, poorly sourced, too dry, disjointed, narcissistic and so on. So what makes a text worthwhile? Rest assured: it has more to do with the author’s intent than with his actual talent.
Here are some good questions to ask oneself before writing:
A “reading experience” depends on the ability to project into the text
Indeed, an effective “reading experience” depends on the reader’s ability to project into the text, to connect with it emotionally, to activate his imagination and capacity for empathy, and therefore to become part of it. That encounter is where the text takes life. As a result, the author’s “ego” must make space for the reader’s “ego.” One can write in the first person, tell stories about oneself, but the reader must be able to take over, engage his/her own senses, and become active in the narration.
This is important because we live in a textual environment where we are constantly assaulted by other people’s egos, which is especially true of social media, but not only. Nonetheless, the sheer density of the textual environment we live in suggests a widespread quest for content. The public seeks such content for a variety of reasons: to trigger, reinforce and stabilize existing emotions; for genuine light-entertainment; to be updated and stay on top of the news; or to edify oneself through publications that help to “make sense” of the world.
The reader must be contemplating a scenery
Typically, we don’t write for one person though. We combine several audiences – colleagues who review, edit and hopefully improve our work, inquisitive family members and friends, people in the field to whom we are accountable, readers in policy-circles, students in international affairs, and so on. That takes us back to the kernel of universality that is needed for a substantive text to find and ideally fire up its audience. It must be deep enough for subject-matter experts to learn; explicit enough for novices to follow; both accurate and humane enough for the concerned to embrace rather than reject it. But those are the core components of a good text anyway – so writing for various publics is less of a constraint than a reminder to strike the right balance.
5 September 2016
Illustration credit: Reading boy by Eastman Johnson on Wikipedia / public domain.