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Author and Audience

It may seem obvious who the author and audience of a student’s essay are. The student is the author, and the professor is the audience; that is true. However, a student is not a normal author, and a student’s professor is not a normal audience. I expand on these two points in this chapter. I begin with the conceptually simpler topic: the abnormality of the professor as the audience.

1.1 The Professor as Audience

It’s indispensable for an author to know who the audience is because different audiences require different ways of explaining. An author should not use the technical language of an electrical engineer to describe how electrons move through wires to electrical outlets. Section 1.3 says more about this matter, and chapter 10 discusses it in detail.

A student is not in the typical position of an author for several reasons. While an author usually chooses her intended audience, the student’s audience is imposed on her. The student’s predicament, however, is not unique. An audience usually chooses his author. But the student’s audience, her professor, does not choose his author; it is his student. Both the author and the audience should make the best of necessity. And necessity often is the motivator for innovation. (The science of soil management developed to meet increased demand for food. Radar was invented to defend against enemy aircraft.)

Unless the student is exceptional, she is not writing to inform or convince her audience of the truth of the position she takes in her essay. So her purpose is not persuasion. Further, unless the topic is exceptional or the professor is unusually ignorant, the student’s purpose is not straightforward exposition or explanation either. Presumably, the professor already understands the material that the student is struggling to present clearly and correctly. Nonetheless, the student should not presuppose that the professor is knowledgeable about the topic being discussed for this reason. In the professor’s role, he should not assume that the student understands the material about which she is writing. It’s her job to show her professor that she understands what the professor already knows. A student may find this paradoxical situation perverse. But this is the existential situation into which the student as author is thrown. (An important part of understanding human beings is understanding that much of a person’s life is not chosen but imposed on her. No one chooses their parents, even to be born.)

Notwithstanding the student’s unusual position, the structure and style of her essay should be the same as an essay of straightforward exposition and explanation. As just mentioned, the student’s goal is to show her professor that she knows some philosophical argument or position by giving an accurate rendering of it; that usually includes showing that she knows why the philosopher holds it. Doing so usually requires laying out the structure of the philosopher’s arguments, the meanings of his technical terms, and the reasons or evidence for his premises. (One difference between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas is that the former cares about the structure and cogency of the arguments.) These matters are explained in chapter 2. The student needs to assume (for the sake of adopting an appropriate authorial stance) that the audience is (1) intelligent but (2) uninformed. The student must state her thesis and then explain what she means. She must prove her thesis or at least provide good evidence for it.

All technical terms have to be explained as if the audience knew little or no philosophy. This means that the student ought to use ordinary words in their ordinary senses. If the meaning of a technical term is not introduced or explained by using ordinary words in their ordinary meanings, then there is no way for the audience to know what the author means. For example, consider this essay fragment:

The purpose of this essay is to prove that human beings never perceive material objects but rather semi‐ideators, by which I mean the interface of the phenomenal object and its conceptual content.

This passage should sound profound for less than a nanosecond. In theory, it is not objectionable to use a technical term to explain a new technical term, but this is acceptable only if the prior technical term has already been explained in ordinary language. The term semi‐ideator is a neologism and is unintelligible to the reader until its meaning is explained. In addition to neologisms, some ordinary words have technical meanings in philosophy, so their particular meaning may need to be made clear. Here are some examples:

• ego
• matter
• pragmatic
• realized
• reflection
• universal

If an author uses a word with an ordinary meaning in an unfamiliar technical sense, the word is ambiguous, and the audience will be misled or confused if that technical meaning is not explained in terms intelligible to the audience.

It is no good to protest that your professor should allow you to use technical terms without explanation on the grounds that the professor knows or ought to know their meaning. To repeat, it is not the professor’s knowledge that is at issue but the student’s. It is her responsibility to show that she knows the meaning of those terms. Do not think that the professor will think that you think that the professor does not understand a term if you define it. If you use a technical term, then it is your term and you are responsible for defining it. Further, a technical term is successfully introduced only if the explanation does not depend on the assumption that the audience already knows the meaning of the technical term! That is what the student has to show.

There is an exception. For advanced courses, a professor may allow the student to assume that the audience knows what a beginning student should know about philosophy, perhaps some logic, parts of Plato’s Republic, Descartes’s Meditations, or something similar. For graduate students, the professor may allow the student to assume a bit more logic, and quite a bit of the history of philosophy. It would be nice if the professor were to articulate exactly what a student is entitled to assume and what not, but he may forget to do this, and, even if he remembers, it is virtually impossible to specify all and only what may be assumed. There is just too much human knowledge and ignorance and not enough time to articulate it all. If you are in doubt about what you may assume, you should ask. Your professor will probably be happy to tell you. If he is not, then the fault is in him, certainly not in his stars, and you can find comfort in the knowledge that in asking, you did the right thing. That is the least that acting on principle gives us.

While I have talked about who your audience is and about how much or how little you should attribute to him, I have not said anything about the attitude you should take toward the audience. The attitude is respect. If you are writing for someone, then you should consider that person worthy of the truth, and if that person is worthy of the truth, then you should try to make that truth as intelligible and accessible to him as possible. Further, if you write for an audience, you are putting demands on that person’s time. You are expecting him to spend time and to expend effort to understand what you have written; if you have done a slipshod job, then you have wasted his time and treated him unfairly. A trivial or sloppy essay is an insult to the audience in addition to reflecting badly on you. If a professor is disgruntled when he returns a set of essays, it may well be because he feels slighted. A good essay is a sign of the author’s respect for the audience.

1.2 The Student as Author

The author should not intrude in her essay. This does not mean that she has to be invisible. Whether the author refers to herself or not should be determined by what is appropriate and idiomatic. Some decades ago, students were forbidden to use “I” in an essay. A phrase like “I will argue” was supposed to be replaced with a phrase like “My argument will be” (or “The argument of this paper” or “It will be argued”). Formal writing is more informal these days. “My argument will be” is verbose and stilted. “I will argue” is preferable for another reason. Although physical courage is widely admired and discussed in contemporary society, intellectual courage is not. Too few rational people have the courage of their convictions, yet convictions that are the result of investigation and reflection deserve the courage needed to defend them.

Ideas have consequences just as surely as physical actions do. Some are good, some are bad; some are wonderful, some are horrid. Own up to yours.

A person who writes, “It will be argued,” is passive; he is exhibiting intellectual courage obliquely at best. By whom will it be argued? If it is you, say so. A person who writes, “I will argue,” is active. She is committing herself to a line of reasoning and openly submitting that reasoning to rational scrutiny.

Philosophical writing is almost never autobiographical even when it contains autobiographical elements. (The Confessions of St. Augustine and those of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau are notable but rare exceptions.) It is very unlikely then that you should expose your personal life or feelings in...