Essay Writing: Traffic Signals for the Reader

You’re writing an essay, and you want to get a good grade, or at least to make your reader understand. Try thinking about your essay from your reader’s point of view. Imagine your reader as a tourist, setting out on a journey, traveling down your written page.

From the outset, she’ll want a roadmap. What lies ahead? In your first paragraph you’ll need to give Dear Reader a summary look at where she is going. That’s the only way she’s going to feel safe and secure about making her way through the verbal landscape ahead. Just a few sentences will do-

“The aardvark and its sleeping habits, its diet and its play will be discussed, with examples from species found on the African continent.”

Once your roadmap is set, the reader is going to expect traffic signals along the way. Capital letters mean GO; periods or full stops mean STOP. Without them, Dear Reader will speed along, crashing into your carefully constructed sentences. If you string together a few sentences without stops and gos, expect somewhere a traffic jam.

Another signal your reader needs is adequate notice before the road branches off to somewhere else. In other words, when you’re starting a new paragraph, give your reader some warning. Dear Reader doesn’t like abrupt surprises. The best way to do it is with one of those signs with an arrow pointing backward and another one pointing ahead. A sentence like, “Not only does the aardvark sleep upside down (that’s the sign pointing backwards to the discussion you’ve just had about its sleeping habits), but also it likes to eat its meals upside down (that’s the road sign pointing to the discussion ahead).” If you put one of these two-way road signs just at the beginning of a new paragraph, your reader will purr right through the transition, secure in where she’s been and where she is going.

It also always helps to point out the obvious to the reader/traveler, just like those road signs that say “Twenty kilometres to the aardvarks,” and then a few minutes later, “Only ten more kilometres to the aardvarks.” Readers like to have the obvious pointed out. So wherever you can in your essay, if you enumerate things and organize neat categories, your reader will appreciate it. You can use sentences like: “There are three things aardvarks like to eat: bugs, roots, and leaves. The first favorite dish, bugs, are found in the.....The second dish the aardvark likes to eat, roots, are plentiful....and so on.” The reader feels she’s got all the mileage signs clearly in view.

And finally, if Dear Reader makes it through your prose, she’ll want to stop at the end of the trip and savor where she’s been. That’s the time to give a wrap-up, a look back over the road, and maybe a suggestion of a new travel direction: “In conclusion, it is clear that the aardvark has peculiar sleeping habits, subsists on a diet of bugs, roots, and leaves, and likes to play hide and seek with others of its species. What is not known, and may merit further research, is why the aardvark spells its name with two a’s.”

Happy journey.