Audience awareness is such a strange thing. It’s perhaps the most important element of being a good writer. With respect to writing, audience awareness isn’t merely about studying readers extensively. Certainly, a writer could learn a lot by doing so. But there are important steps after audience analysis: moving from knowing about an audience to writing for those readers. The steps after audience analysis require discerning what kinds of writing you want to craft. As a writer, you must figure out how awareness shapes your writing choices.

A little academic story

I was only able to defend my dissertation once I internalized the way my advisors provided me with feedback. That is, I was only able to write a dissertation once I had enough interactions with Donna and Anne to understand the intense expectations of a PhD. I naively thought that Donna simply wanted intensely organized chapters, with scaffolding paragraphs at the beginning of each. I realized that this was an expectation of a dissertation as a genre and academic writing more generally. I can now think about Donna, imagine her reading a document, and make choices around organizing my writing. She is with me, in my own head, an imagined construct. With my other advisor, Anne wanted consistency when writing about specialized terms or phrases. She was intensely critical of any terms that seemed to “slide” around. These were signals of quality and expectations of the deep care that goes into a dissertation. I channel Anne to become critical of the terms I’m using.

It’s become a weird power. I carry around ways of writing for Donna and Anne. I have them in my head. This ability, channeling or whatever you want to call it, only develops after I’ve received feedback several times. I need feedback on the order of something like 7-12 times.

I have four imagined readers that take the form of my undergraduate professors: Harriet Pollack, Saundra Morris, Jeff Turner, Richard Fleming. Harriet tells me to slow my writing down. Saundra reminds me to be precise. Sometimes, she and Anne have arguments in my head. Professor Snape (aka Turner) tells me to stay true to the text. Fleming stares at me silently, sitting in a corner. I want to impress him.

I wanted to impress Donna and Anne. I wanted Harriet not only to read my essays about Willa Cather but to think about them. I wanted her to sit with my writing. I wanted Saundra to read my criticism of Emerson’s poems and smile at my prose. Snape…I wanted Snape to see how much virtue ethics had changed my life.

I’ve never wanted to impress ChatGPT.

AI writing isn’t an audience

AI chatbots can never be a true reader. Never. They’re trained on the entire internet but they can never replace a human reader. Human readers are idiosyncratic. We have limbic systems. We don’t just experience pain or hurt. We feel it. AI chatbots have math. Humans get hangry. We love pizza with mercurial toppings. We cry. We take joy in random things. I love woolly caterpillars. I save them if they’re stuck on a sidewalk. My children have drawn me pictures of woollies. They’ve drawn them for me. They know their audience.

I recently read a few articles about students being upset at their teachers for using AI to grade or provide feedback. They should be. Writers need audiences. Writers yearn to be read. Student writing needs to have a reader but no one is going to read novice manuscripts unless it’s a teacher. Students need readers, not grades. Real readers, with limbic systems, not rubrics.

I’ve never wanted to impress a rubric.

Bill told me my writing was a “little didactic”

My colleague, Bill Hart-Davidson or Bill HD as I like to think of him, told me my writing was didactic. Didactic means to instruct, usually in a bad way. My writing tried to control readers too much. Bill told me this over lunch in Pittsburgh in April of 2019. He had a veggie burger. I had a beet salad.

When Bill passed away suddenly in spring of 2024, I made pizza with his dough recipe. His dough recipe is very instructive but it called for being flexible about the amount of oil and milk you added to it. “Add to taste,” the recipe says. I try to write less instructively nowadays. Since 2019, in the limit sections of my academic papers, I try to add genuine suggestions for future research.

I wanted to impress Bill.

AI writing is too dense, too even

Recent research shows that AI writing is quite different from human writing. AI writing is too informationally dense. That’s why it’s so difficult to read. It’s like a sundae with everything on it. Just too much. Multiple concepts in a sentence, concepts connected in only vague ways. It loves listing things, cataloguing loads of nouns. The sentence structure of AI writing is decidedly unvaried, awful in fact. Human writing has short sentences. Long ones. They burst. They drone on. Good human writing excites readers. It makes us feel.

AI writing adds “-ing” to everything, or what the technical linguists call present participial clauses. These machines rarely mention people. They rarely use epistemic stance markers, which is a fancy term for the writer revealing their perspective on the subject matter. Humans add something of themselves to a text. As far as I know, I’ve never seen ChatGPT use epistemic stance markers.

It’s been three years since I lost my father

When my stepmother called to tell me my father died, an intense wave of pain rippled through me. I cried out from the visceral hurt. It felt like a heart attack. My older child still talks about hearing me call out. Remembers it. Recalls it. Feels it in a limbic system.

A month after my father died, I was granted indefinite tenure. If you know anything about academia, this is a career milestone. I felt nothing. Indifference. All I wanted to do was call my dad. I listened to his last voicemail dozens of times. (It was about the NBA and whether Joel Embiid could stay healthy.)

My dad was terrible at typing. He hunted and pecked. His emails obeyed no standard rules of discretion. No formatting to the emails. Maybe half sentences. He didn’t craft his email. Just made his point and moved on.

When I was in seventh grade, I typed out my first school paper. I had written out the entire draft by hand. The Sunday before it was due, I started typing but was so slow that I asked to have lunch in front of the computer. My father said no.

My dad was impressed with my typing.

We ate lunch together, then he sat down to help me write. He was slower at typing than I was!

I imagine my dad hunting and pecking as I write. Other occasions, I imagine him typing wildly fast, nothing at all how he actually typed. A hallucination of my own.

On the limits of audience

There are limits to audience awareness. There are limits to AI writing. There are limits to academic writing. We don’t always write for transactional purposes. Sometimes, you just gotta get something out. Expurgate it. Ignore your audience. You write with tears streaming down your face because you carry around audiences, readers who never leave you, ghosts who help you write.