Writing to Your Audience in Academia

One of the most important principles in communicating ideas, especially formal writing (which this blog is not), is that you must decide to what kind of audience you intend to write (so that you know what level of knowledge to assume and what level of knowledge you must establish). The alternatives to deciding on an audience are to either implicitly assume your audience knows nothing beyond basic English, requiring you to reduce all of your ideas to sense-perception and integrate your entire hierarchy explicitly (a near-impossible task that would fill a library if completed) or implicitly assume your audience knows everything you know, meaning you don't have to communicate anything at all. I don't tend to have trouble with this principle in most cases, but there is one context in which I, and many others that I know of, have trouble defining the audience: academic work.

Whether writing an essay for class or answering problems on an exam, at least part of the purpose is to communicate to the professor that you understand the material. The problem is, you aren't doing this directly (you don't write an essay to your math teacher saying "I understand partial differentiation, and here's proof), you do it indirectly by proving that understanding by applying it. This is where defining the audience becomes a problem: What can you assume about your audience's knowledge?

Sometimes the assignment is such that you can assume the professor's full knowledge (such as an essay about a topic that the professor didn't teach to you himself), or sometimes you can assume that your audience is your classmates at their best, but in most cases you are in the middle. For example, if your assignment is to write an essay applying Maslow's motivational theory to an article in the newspaper, you can't necessarily assume your professor's full knowledge because that could lead to an essay which any psychologist would understand but wouldn't prove that you have a full grasp of the theory. Similarly, you can't assume your classmates' knowledge, because you don't need to reteach the theory in the essay. You must choose a middle ground audience, one that doesn't exist, that, in this example, has a basic grasp of Maslow's theory but may need a bit of explanation whenever you apply one of the points of the theory.

That this is a problem is expressed in the classroom in two ways which distort the issue. The first is when an assignment is announced and a student asks "how much detail will we need to put?" or some similar question. This is not exactly the right question, because the same audience may need very little detail on some points and explicit, in-depth detail on others, and the same applies to your assignment. A similar way the problem presents itself is when a professor (particularly in math and science courses) instructs the student to "show their work". While this is a valid instruction in that it tells students not to assume that the audience will know everything they, or the professor, knows, it is invalid in that it leaves no guidance beyond excluding that one extreme; if taken literally, the student showing his work on a calculus exam will have to trace his process of inducing the concept of "number", among many other things. The proper issue at hand in both of these cases is: Write to the correct audience.

But how is that audience properly determined? I don't have a complete answer, and I certainly welcome comments. I do think a good lead to the question is suggested above: The purpose of the assignment is to communicate indirectly to your professor what you know, so you must choose your audience in order to achieve that purpose.

P.S. Just before publishing this I realized another example of where this was an issue for me: The The Fountainhead essay contest. I knew I could assume my audience had read the book, but did I have to assume they only had a basic, shallow understanding? Could I assume that my audience was the actual judges, who have extensive knowledge and years of study of Objectivism? This was a significant issue, and I intend to contact ARI with a similar question for the Atlas Shrugged essay contest this fall.