Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
John Steinbeck
Writing in health professions education presents unique challenges. Whether we’re crafting learning objectives for students, describing clinical cases for colleagues, or writing up research findings for publication, we constantly navigate between technical precision and accessibility. How do we maintain academic rigour while explaining complex physiological processes to first-year students? When should we assume shared knowledge, and when do we need to break concepts down?
These questions point to a fundamental aspect of effective writing that’s often overlooked: our audience. While we spend considerable time perfecting our content and polishing our prose, we sometimes forget that writing is fundamentally an act of communication between writer and reader. This edition of the newsletter aims to offer insights that help us better connect with the readers of our writing, whether they’re students, peers, or editors.
Podcast
The Knowledge Project (2024). Charlie Hoehn: Write Something People Want to Read. Farnam Street.
In this episode, Charlie Hoehn explains the secrets behind why some books are unforgettable, and others no one seems to remember. He shares his journey of helping authors transform their ideas into best-selling books and provides actionable advice on structuring, writing, and marketing a book. You’ll learn how to craft titles that make people want to read your book, design compelling covers that stand out on the shelves, and use certain strategies to engage readers effectively depending on the ideas you communicate. Hoehn also shares the psychology behind book promotion, how to leverage feedback, and the dynamics of traditional versus self-publishing. Whether tackling a novel or email, this episode will transform how you write and communicate.
Article
Lingard, Lorelei (2022). Writing for the Reader: Using Reader Expectation Principles to Maximize Clarity. Perspectives on Medical Education, s40037-022-00708-w.
This Writer’s Craft distils the reader expectation approach for achieving clarity through attention to the structural location of information. Drawing on work from the fields of rhetoric, linguistics and cognitive psychology, the reader expectation approach reflects this premise: readers of English interpret information more easily if it is placed where they expect to find it. Reader expectations about structure, therefore, constitute a powerful resource for writers. This Writer’s Craft outlines the key principles of reader expectation and illustrates how to apply them in sentences and paragraphs to achieve those coveted prose features: clarity and flow.
Resource
Thomson, Pat (2020). Revising like a Reader. Patter (blog).
Academic writers should consider how their target readers might respond to the text, and proposes several questions to help writers adopt a “reader-ish” mindset. These questions cover aspects like definitions, assumptions, credibility, interpretations, and the overall significance and quality of the writing. The goal is to help writers produce persuasive, well-structured, and accessible academic texts that effectively convey their ideas and arguments to the reader.