Leonard Cassuto on Taking Care of Your Reader

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All academic writers begin their journeys in the classroom. There they write for an audience of one person: the teacher.

Professors read students’ work as evaluators. The evaluator has a specific job: to read their students’ writing from beginning to end and assess it. The central quality of the evaluator’s job is thoroughness. She will read your work closely and completely. One of my former teachers, Edward Tayler, described it this way:

With proper allowance for human weakness, you may reasonably hope for an attentive, sympathetic reading of every word you write—a kind of reading you may not reasonably hope for ever again.

This kind of careful reading is a gift. As Simone Weil put it: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

But there’s another concrete and essential reason why student writers may expect this careful attention: the reader is getting paid.

The evaluator’s position as a paid reader is the exact opposite of the general reader’s. General readers pay for the privilege of reading (by buying books or magazines, or subscribing to websites), and they feel no obligation whatever to be thorough. General readers will quit reading if they don’t enjoy what they’re doing, or if they don’t feel they’re getting something worthwhile out of the experience.

Every academic writer begins by writing for a captive audience: someone who is literally being paid to pay attention. Long before they set foot in graduate school or venture beyond it, academic writers spend years getting used to a reader who can’t be distracted or discouraged, because that reader receives cash to read to the end.

The main problem with writing for a captive audience is that it teaches us to take the reader’s attention for granted. Student writers learn to be long-winded because they know—consciously or not—that their reader won’t quit on them. They can begin a mile away from their topic and slowly work their way in. Or they may supply three examples where one will do (usually to fill up pages to reach an assigned word limit—tell me you’ve never done that), all because they trust that the reader will dutifully trudge through.

When student writers sit down to write for a paid audience of one, they enact the primal scene of academic writing. Like other mythical moments of originary consciousness—the fall of Adam and Eve, the Freudian discovery of civilization’s discontents, and so on—this primal scene portends disappointment. It points to its own future failures.

But academic writing’s primal scene begets far worse than prolixity. Its worst symptom is that it promotes a disconnection from, and disregard for, the reader.

If you know that your readers will stay with you no matter what, you don’t have to worry too much about how you treat them. Instead of working to care for the reader, academic writers are taught by their earliest experience that readers are unconditionally invested. They require no consideration because they’re already on the hook. That unfortunate lesson invites all kinds of bad writing, and with it the genesis of this book.

Like all primal scenes, the academic writer’s beginning ripples forward to affect the future. Academic writers don’t leave our primal scene behind. Instead, we re-create and repeat it. (I know I have. I’ve made many of the mistakes that I warn against.) After we pass the stage of writing for an audience of one, we go on to make many of the same bad moves when we write for wider audiences, often with the hope of getting published. Unexamined bad habits become enshrined. Care for the reader remains an afterthought—or no thought at all.

The primal scene thus stays with us ever after. Writing a paper for your undergraduate professor, a dissertation for a committee, and an article for publication are really three versions of the same exercise, separated by time and experience. Like the professor who reads a student’s work, the evaluators of journal and book submissions are paid readers also.

My book, Academic Writing as if Readers Matter is full of rules and principles for writers. Here’s the first one:

Even if the reader is being paid, it is better to write as though he or she were not. Write to earn your reader’s attention, and then keep on earning it.

On Rules(and Rule-Breaking)

I wrote a book on academic writing for two main reasons. The first is that academic writing has a bad public reputation, with painful results that affect us all. Imagine standing up to announce that most scholarly books and articles are boring, impenetrable, or worse. The response would be a collective shrug—because that sentiment has become a virtual cliché. Most academic writing is assumed to be terrible. Every academic writer starts out in that deep hole.

I would characterize the problem differently. I find that most academic writing is unfriendly and ungenerous. Too many academic writers treat their readers indifferently, or worse. But our readers are the reason that academia—and academic writing—exist in the first place. Poor academic writing contributes to a larger lack of respect for academic work.

That disrespect is everybody’s business. If higher education is a public good—and it must be—then it must interact fruitfully with the wider public. Yet the writers working in higher education mistreat various publics, including our closest community of fellow academic readers. Too much academic writing sends an unfortunate message to readers: you don’t matter.

Which brings me to the second reason for writing my book: because reading most academic writing is work. We (and by “we,” I don’t mean just professors and students, but anyone engaged in serious intellectual inquiry) may read academic writing as part of our jobs, but that doesn’t mean that reading it has to feel like work. Put simply, most academic writing is reader-unfriendly.

This unfriendliness problem also affects all of us—and again, I don’t mean only people who work at colleges and universities. Academic writing, like the intellectual mission it demonstrates, badly needs renovation, lest it be dismissed and torn down by a public that is increasingly skeptical about it. The public judges us by what we say, starting with how we say it.

As I was finishing my book, artificial intelligence (AI) abruptly arose as a frightening specter on the writing landscape. Large Language Model such as ChatGPT are already provoking questions of whether writing will soon turn into the esoteric practice of a small population of specialists. The role of Generative AI will surely shake out in the coming years, and I offer my own early thoughts on that subject in the appendix to this book. The capacities of AI already amaze—but they don’t include conscious, connected communication.

A writer who does a good job forges a connection with the reader, and sympathetic understanding flows back and forth. Too much academic writing lacks writerly effort to create that connection. Nor is the problem limited to academic writing. Today’s public sphere is filled with too much noise and not enough actual communication.

If academics are to fulfill their role as teachers, then we ought to model communication—a connection between writer and reader—at every level of the academic enterprise. How to connect is a skill that’s not limited to writing—but writing can teach it. And we can use more of it in the world.

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Academic Writing as if Readers Mattered by Leonard Cassuto is available now via Princeton University Press.