“Writing Expresses and Shares Meaning to Be Reconstructed by the Reader” by Charles Bazerman goes in depth about the responsibility of the writer to be as clear as possible within their writing. He explains that when writing if anything is left too broad, that the reader will interpret your meaning based on their own experiences and reach a different conclusion. He explains how this is especially problematic due to the author and the reader having different states of mind and therefore different senses of meaning.
While writers can confirm that the written words feel consistent with their state of mind, readers can never read the writer’s mind to confirm they fully share that state of mind. Readers share only the words to which each separately attributes meanings. Thus, meanings do not reside fully in the words of the text not in the unarticulated minds but only in the dynamic relation of writer, reader, and text.
In the article, Bazerman talks in depth about the importance of clarity in your writing, and while reading about it, I thought about the essays I have written over the years and how the scores may not have been as high as they could have been because of clarity issues. I have a tendency to get riled up when talking about subjects that interest me, and I am not as vocally clear as I should be. Bazerman goes to say, “While writers can confirm that the written words feel consistent with their state of mind, readers can never read the writer’s mind to confirm they fully share that state of mind.” This means that to the writer the writing makes perfect sense, but someone else trying to interpret the writer through their writing is much more difficult task. Which makes total sense when considering issues with a writer’s clarity in regard to the reader’s perspective. When I write, I always know exactly what I mean; the difficulty is translating that same clarity to someone who does not share the same level of understanding as I do. Although I write with audience in careful consideration, I cannot recall considering how the reader my interpret my words. This presents a clarity issue with an obvious but not-so-easy solution: writing with the reader’s perspective in mind. As a reader, it may serve you well to read with the writer’s perspective in mind. Not only because it may increase the clarity of the reading, but it may also go a long way to furthering your understanding as a writer on how to write with more clarity. A metaphorical jump into someone else’s shoes.
