When Your Reader Is Impatient

I’m going to be honest here: I’m an impatient reader.

That doesn’t mean that I’m a critical reader, or one who just wants you to be done writing right now. I am fundamentally a generous reader, who wants your text to succeed and is looking for the ways in which it does — at least as your editor. As a reader, I’m a little more demanding — as will your readers be.

It does mean that I don’t want to wait for a text to lead me slowly through a carefully compounding set of evidence up to a great crescendo of point, somewhere toward the end, without a sense of why, how, or what, before that.

I want to know, early and clearly, what I’m going to be reading and what the point is — both the point that you are ultimately making as well as the greater point of learning what I’m about to take in. It doesn’t have to be all of it, but it does have to be some of it, and enough to give a clear indication of the central dynamic at play and your position on it.

I want to know why it’s worth it for me to take the many twists, turns, and steps your writing is about to lead me through. Even more crucially, I want a sense of where we’re going before we go down those paths so that I can not just follow you through it but take the journey with you — understanding along the way why we’re orienting this way and able to put these things together with you.

I also want to know clearly when we’re moving steps in your argument across the book and why.

Sharing that process with you, the writer, gives me, the reader, an active role in the manuscript. It also — and this is what I care about the most — prepares me to be able to assess both your evidence and your own mode of arguing it independently in the moment. It’s more fun that way, and more effective.

It may sound like I’m arguing for an old-school analytic writing style.

For anyone who was trained in U.S. composition when I was (early 2000s), this might sound like the distinction between “analytic” writing (at its most reductive, the 5-paragraph essay high school students were taught at the time, with the main thesis statement foregrounded prominently at the top) and “continental” writing (that more meandering, contemplative essay through an idea, leading to the big claim revelation toward the end, with maybe a small section after reflecting on the implications of the revelation, much beloved to many humanities graduate students, especially at first introduction).

I’m being both overly schematic and overly reductive, for clarity’s sake and because those are the terms I have at hand when thinking about those polarities. They are also, to my knowledge, two of the main forms that still structure U.S. academic humanities thought, even though that is changing.

(And as I write this, I’m becoming increasingly aware of how I need to seek more of that out, how dated my scholarship is, so if you have some resources and want to tell me, I’d love that.)

The limitations of this schema are mine and are not intended to convey the range and breadth, or desired frames, of writing, thought, and structures, even within the academy (or at least I hope so, for the latter). There are many other ways of structuring thought and argumentation, coming from alternate epistemologies, neurodivergences, field requirements, and creative goals, to name only a few possibilities. I’m also aware that both poles, which I was taught to think of as a difference between U.S. American analytic form and continental European form, are Western and white — in their epistemologies, power structures, and intellectual traditions. And that’s clearly not enough, or okay.

But I’m not.

What I think is productive about laying out these two forms in this moment is the structural clarity they can give for writers, especially early stage writers. And also again for more advanced writers, scholars and graduate students, who need to think through how they are writing their argument, why, and how an alternate — or perhaps even hybrid — structure of some sort might better serve them.

And for scholars, whose writing goals vary even more, being intentional in your structural clarity can help negotiate those different audiences and forms more easily, perhaps even experimentally.

Years ago, I was teaching a first-year writing seminar in a U.S. university, and it was time to talk about essay structures — particularly the different ways that you can use your form of argumentation as part of your argument, and how that can differ according to what you want to achieve. This is nuanced, especially if you’ve not been taught to think about structures as possibilities, or even what you’re doing, other than it’s something you’ve been taught.

I drew charts laying out these two different structures and asked students who had been taught what. Those raised in the U.S. were mostly coming with the analytic frame. By and large, those from countries other than the U.S. were more familiar with the second. And some students were able to give us other forms I could add to the board. We talked about these differences and the strengths and weaknesses of these forms. Both for that particular institution we were in but also for intended audiences at other times and places.

Even at that specific institution, we decided, how we wrote might differ — as long as the main point and claim is clear for our audiences, and given at the time most appropriate for the form they were writing in. Usually this is somewhere up front, even if it’s not in its fullness yet. And as I intimated at the start of this post, that’s what I’m looking for when I open a piece of scholarly writing.

It may sound like I’m asking for a “hook.”

Central to the hook is the focus on audience. How can you appeal most immediately, directly, and clearly to your intended audience? Given the duration of the scholarly reading experience, we can reframe that question this way: How can we frame our books so that they grab a reader’s interest and keep it along the way?

I once attended a talk on turning your dissertation into a book. Given by Duke University Press, the talk emphasized how dissertations and books, while based on similar material often, are doing two different things, with two different audiences. The dissertation proves that you have learned something, is often structured according to how you learned it or processed it intellectually, and often builds to the implications for further research at the end. It can be a lengthy journey for readers.

That’s okay, the editor said, because your dissertation is talking to a small, captive audience — your committee. They are committed to reading it (whether they want to or not), so you have leeway in your pacing and argumentation. It’s the opposite for the book, though.

For a book (or, I’d add, most scholarly writing), foremost you need to grab someone’s attention. Your book audience is elective, and your challenge in writing for them is to keep them with you, once they pick up the text. You want your writing to be informative but also engaging, and if possible, even fun. (This is also a key point in William Germano’s classic and very helpful From Dissertation to Book, if you want to read more about this process.)

And I sort of am, but more.

So back to me, the impatient reader. And you, the scholar writing for people like me.

Let’s make the reading experience as easy and clear as possible, from the very start. Give readers the stakes early on and posit a central claim for them to hold on to as you move through your text. Help them see why this matters, within your area and beyond it.

A reader, even an impatient one, is much more likely to be willing to wade through detail or take a slight detour in the middle of a chapter or engage in the minutiae of a thorny philosophical debate if you’ve given them, up front, a clear sense of why they’re doing it, including what you are proving (or contesting) and why it matters. And continue to do so at each big shift across the book.

One way to do that is to lead me, the reader, through what you think, but not necessarily (or usually) in the way that you learned to think of it. Perhaps flip the mode from a journey of discovery (often how we write first drafts, since we’re learning ourselves) to an up-front statement of the discovery and then take me along the road that most effectively communicates both the discovery and the process of understanding it.

So, in your current writing, what is the ultimate payoff? How can you foreground that immediately, and across the text, to grab readers — even the impatient ones — and then keep them engaged, as if they, too, are doing this project with you? Without pandering to them, how can you keep readers from putting your writing down? And how can you do it in a way that is clear while still writing with the rigor and care that scholarship requires, and deserves?

I’m impatient, but if I’ve picked up your book, I am rooting for you. I want to keep reading, so how can you make that as easy as possible for me?