Writing Tip

Improve Your Prose by Considering the Implied Author

Difficulty Level: Advanced

Recommendation: Imagine a Reader Imagining You: Consider the Implied Author of Your Document

When we read, we tend to imagine the author. This mental image—called the implied author—is not the authentic author, but a patchwork fiction informed by the words of the authentic author. If you, the authentic author, can crystallize in your mind the concept of the implied author, you can go a long way toward superior communication. Encouraging the reader to think good things about you is all about your awareness of the reader as you compose your documents—your word choices, the way you put those words together, your subjects.

The implied author is one of several parts of your composition strategy (the planning you do to prepare for a writing project, such as a technical report). By declaring how you want the reader to feel about you, you create constraints on your language, and that ensures that the reader doesn’t react negatively to your words. Here are a few ways that you can control the way that your reader constructs the implied author:

• You want to sound intelligent but not elite: Dedicate yourself to precision. Use words that precisely convey meaning. Avoid using words that your reader may not know, which may alienate the reader. And, to express your mastery of the subject, use technical words that your readers know. Jargon is good when you and your reader share a technical vocabulary.
• You want to sound educated about the subject matter: Parenthetical statements and asides that extend to overall meaning demonstrate a superior knowledge of the subject matter. Also, addressing anticipated reader questions establishes a teacher-student relationship. These can take the form of “X may be true, but consider Y.”
• You want to sound like an all-star writer: Consider getting an editor. Unless your grammar and mechanics are impeccable, harness the skills of a seasoned editor to ensure full compliance with the rules. At worst, several errors detected by the reader may render you the fool.
• You want to sound sober or playful: Sober is the default tenor of most engineers. Playful is often a linguistic trap, wherein the reader perceives you as flippant instead of charming. In fact, a playful attitude is virtually verboten in technical reports, but there are other document genres that accommodate wit, and articles for magazines and journals may incorporate the author’s full personality (but that doesn’t mean that the reader will construct a charming author). We don’t possess the wit of Oscar Wilde, but if you have a good wit that you can press into service in your writing, then your reader will paint you charming.

Case Study

I wrote an article comparing the U.S. Constitution to modern documents to appreciate how far along we have come in technical communication. By determining upfront the type of reader I wanted—a reader who is compassionate, sympathetic to my cause, and open-minded to the proposition that the Constitution is often ambiguous—I recognized the need to substantively change my default writing style. This change extended my writing time but paid off in less hate mail.

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