Life as an Average Academic Reader

Sometimes I think that my current job is about being paid to be an average academic reader. What is this 'average academic reader'?

The average academic reader is, ultimately, who we are writing to. That isn't to say that there aren't other audiences, and that they aren't important. In the early stages of drafting, writing for yourself - to find out what you know and think - is more constructive. Your supervisor(s) will be your most immediate audience, but the intellectual and emotion investments in the supervisor-student relationship, and their familiarity with your project, differentiate them from the average academic reader. Even your examiners will be different to the average academic reader - they've signed up to read the whole thing, and they are looking at it with a particular set of expectations and criteria in mind. (For the moment, I'm leaving aside the whole issue of writing for a general public, though I do think that is important.) The 'average academic reader' is a person who might pick up your published thesis or sections of thesis. They are also an abstraction of the broader scholarly community that research students are entering into dialogue with.

From the mere fact that the average academic reader has bothered to start trying to read your work, you can assume that they are in some way interested in it, and want to hear about your research. It's in your best interest to encourage that engagement and not to push the average academic reader over to the darkside (and when academic readers go darkside, trust me, it's all bad). Being consious of this reader, especially when you are at the revising and editing stages of your writing will help make your writing more appealing to its final audience.

So I'm starting off an occasional series on the average academic reader: likes, dislikes, natural habit, etc. I'll take requests and suggestions from the (vitual) floor.

For now, I'll start with one simple aspect of the average academic reader - they prefer the title (or subtitle) of a piece of work to match up with the contents!