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So you know how fiction writers always say that the first draft is you telling the story to yourself, and editing is you telling it to someone who doesn& #39;t live in your head?
FOLKS, THIS APPLIES TO NON-FICTION/ACADEMIC WRITING TOO!
(Excuse the shouting, I& #39;ve had no sleep.)
FOLKS, THIS APPLIES TO NON-FICTION/ACADEMIC WRITING TOO!
(Excuse the shouting, I& #39;ve had no sleep.)
I find lots of people who are new to non-fiction/academic writing don& #39;t really know that they, too, are telling a story. (And in some cases don& #39;t realise that they& #39;re making an argument, which is not dissimilar.)
BTW, this is something I& #39;ve had to learn and refine over the years myself.
I was a good, experienced writer across a range of registers including academic when I started my PhD. One of my supervisors still had to basically take up permanent residence at the back of my head asking awkward questions about the structure of my writing.
(I thanked her for this in my thesis acknowledgements.)
Anyway, whether you are telling a fictional story or making an academic argument or trying to communicate something else, your aim is the same: that the reader walks away with the same understanding as you. (We& #39;ll discuss death of the author another time.)
But the reader is starting from a different starting point to you. So you need to take them on a journey. And that journey needs to start where they& #39;re starting, not where you& #39;re starting.
To make the story/argument make sense to them, you have to explain the context, your assumptions, what you did and why, what happened, and what you think that means. (Oh hang on: intro, lit review, methodology, results, discussion/conclusion.)
And the first time you do this will generally make sense to you but will frequently not have gone far enough towards the starting point of the reader.
And yes, this does mean you need to know who you& #39;re writing for, and that the same thing written for two different audiences should be written differently.
So when you& #39;re editing, ask yourself: what knowledge and assumptions do I have that the reader does not? At what point does the reader need to know these things? How do I get them across? When reading any given section/paragraph, how does the reader know *why it& #39;s there*?
And what work is this section/paragraph doing to get the reader from their starting point to where I want them to end up?
(Fun fact: One of the most brutal yet useful comment I& #39;ve ever got from a co-author was "What& #39;s this paragraph doing here? I like the individual sentences but I can& #39;t tell why they& #39;re there." She was right.)
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