Most writing advice assumes an audience. Define your reader, the advice goes. Know who you are writing for. Understand what they need, what they already know, what they want to feel when they finish. This is sound advice for most professional writing, and following it produces work that is clear, purposeful, and appropriately pitched.

It is also, for certain kinds of writing, a way of not writing at all.

The essay that is conceived entirely in terms of its audience tends to produce a particular kind of writing — competent, oriented, reader-friendly, and slightly hollow. The writer who asks, at every stage, what the reader needs, is not asking what they actually think. The two questions are different, and they produce different writing. One produces a service. The other produces a piece of work.

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