It is well known that writing is a way to convey a message to another person, but less people consider that the way the reader interprets the message can lead to very different understandings from the original text.
In an excerpt from Naming What We Know, Charles Bazerman, an American author and winner of the 2018 James R. Squire Award, explores the idea that writing is the writer trying to communicate something in their head to a reader, who may not always get the intended message from the words: “While a writer’s meanings arise out of the expression of internal thought, the meanings attributed by a reader arise from the objects, experiences, and words available to that reader.” He also briefly considers how this dis-junction between a reader and writer can motivate writers to try and improve, and encourage readers to try and better decipher the author’s true meaning.
After reading Charles Bazerman’s work, I have developed a further understanding of how writing attempts to portray a writer’s thoughts to a reader. It is not only the writer who needs to try and find the perfect way to describe exactly what they mean, as there is not always a way to do this with simple text, but the reader also needs to learn to use context the author provides to figure out what the author truly intends in their writing.
“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.” – Bazerman
Unlike speech, where each participant has many different methods to provide extra meaning to their words, writing has very few ways to do this. In speech, a person can change their tone of voice to provide a deeper meaning, or their body language can show how they feel, all while saying the exact same words. Writing, however, does not provide this tool, exclamation marks and question marks may help in some circumstances, but they can not provide diverse meaning to the same sentence like a speaker can.
Essentially, a writer can only translate his thoughts and messages into words, and readers may give these words a different meaning than the writer, or even other readers. As such a writer is always met with the need to try and be as precise as possible while writing to help prevent such misunderstandings. In the same way, readers are also presented with the task of attempting to consider what the writer meant in his writings, and whether they are seeing it as intended. In the end, it is important for readers to try and understand what the author intends to say with their words, and writers need to try and find more effective ways to communicate their intentions with the reader.
