Who Am I Writing For?
At school, you probably had exercises where you took on a particular kind of voice to write to an imaginary “real world” audience. At uni, you don’t get that kind of assignment any more, and your audience is obviously the tutor who reads your essay. So the voice of a learner, writing to a teacher, seems the obvious one to adopt.
But if that’s so, then why does the tutor write comments in your margins like, “Who are you referring to?” — “Why do you think this?” — “This needs some explanation” — “Evidence?” — “Source?” — After all, s/he has read the stuff you’ve read, s/he knows where your ideas come from, and s/he knows what you mean — well, probably. So why is s/he pretending not to? It’s because, once again, the audience you’re being trained to write for is not your real audience, the tutor, but a fictitious audience of distant readers who know less than you do about your topic. These imaginary people might be in the same field, but they haven’t asked the question you’ve asked, or explored the same material. These readers, if they existed, would need you to identify and explain the things you’re writing about. They’d need examples to help them follow your ideas, and facts to show them what your ideas are based on. They would want to know exactly where your information came from so they could go to that source and read more about it (hence our fetish for references and bibliographies). It’s useful to imagine such an audience, because in life after uni, nobody’s going to ask you to tell them what they already know! — you will need this skill of making unfamiliar ideas and information clear and available to other people.
And your voice? Well, for this crowd, it isn’t the depth of your feeling, the strength of your language, or their feeling of identification with you that they will find persuasive. It’s things like how soon you make your point, how clearly you explain your ideas, how well you demonstrate them with evidence, how logically you move from one point to the next, and how doggedly you stick to the topic. Don’t lose your other voices, in case you turn out to need them in later life (and secretly like them better!); but in an essay, you are the expert, helping somebody less expert to understand the question you’re asking, what material is relevant, and how it bears on the question. So, when you’re ready to move to your final draft, try to read it as if you were that kind of reader, to see what may still need to be added or explained. If you possibly can, hand it to a real reader of that kind, and ask them to tell you what they think you’re saying, and whether there are any places where they need to know more, or they’re not sure what you meant. That gives you a chance to plug the holes and reword the mysterious bits before your tutor gets in there with the “surely this needs some explanation?”