Larry McEnerney’s insight—that academic writing exists to help readers understand better something they want to understand well—is more radical than it sounds. Most academic writing isn’t reader-centered at all. It’s résumé-centered. Look at what I know. Look at how smart I am. Look at my command of theory, my mastery of method, my original contribution. The text exists to credential the writer, not to help readers think.
So teaching reader-centered writing is already a corrective. It’s already asking writers to stop performing and start serving. To stop treating texts as monuments to individual brilliance and start treating them as tools for collective understanding.
But I keep thinking: What happens when the readers you need don’t exist yet?
McEnerney’s framework assumes a stable situation: there’s a community of readers who care about certain questions, and your job is to help them understand those questions better. You identify the instability they recognise (or should recognise), show them the costs of leaving it unresolved, and offer your work as a solution. The community’s interests are given. Your task is to serve them.
But what if you’re writing at a border?
What if you’re trying to understand something that doesn’t fit neatly into any existing disciplinary conversation? What if the readers who should care about your question are scattered across different fields, speaking different languages, asking questions that don’t quite connect? What if the very structure of how communities organise their care—what they think is worth understanding—is part of what needs to be rethought?
This isn’t a hypothetical problem. It’s the situation most interesting work finds itself in.
Think about writing that tries to hold Berlin and the Middle East together—not as separate objects of study (Berlin here, Middle East there) but as mutually constitutive, as folded into each other in ways that exceed disciplinary boundaries. Who are your readers? Middle East scholars? Urban studies people? Migration researchers? German historians? Each community has different stakes, different problems they recognise, different ways of deciding what counts as understanding.
You could write for one community, making your work legible to their concerns. But then you’d lose the other communities—and probably lose what’s most interesting about the work, which is precisely what exceeds any single disciplinary frame.
Or you could try to write for multiple communities at once. But then you face the translation problem: you’re constantly explaining to each community why they should care about what the other community cares about. The text becomes crowded with justifications, bridges, apologies for terminology. And still, readers from each community might feel like you’re not really writing for them.
Or—and this is what interests me—you could write for readers who don’t yet exist as a coherent community. Readers who are scattered across different fields but who might, if they read your work, start to recognise each other. Start to see that they’re asking related questions. Start to form a new community of concern.
But how do you write for readers who don’t exist yet?
This is where McEnerney’s framework strains. Because it assumes you can identify your readers, understand what they care about, and show them why your work matters to their existing concerns. But what if your work is trying to create new concerns? What if you’re not just helping readers understand better—you’re trying to change what they think is worth understanding at all?
McEnerney knows this problem exists. He mentions it briefly: sometimes a writer can change what a community cares about. But he’s clear this is “rare and difficult” and “carries serious danger.” Better to align your work with what readers already want to understand.
And he’s not wrong. Most work that tries to create entirely new problems fails. Readers don’t engage. Papers get rejected. Careers stall.
But if everyone follows this advice, how does intellectual change happen? How do new questions emerge? How do fields transform?
There’s a temporal paradox here. The work that most successfully serves existing readers’ interests is work that reinforces existing structures of attention. It makes incremental progress on problems the community already recognises. This is valuable—most knowledge advances this way. But it can’t disrupt. It can’t ask fundamentally new questions. It can’t point to instabilities the community doesn’t yet see as instabilities.
For that, you need writing that’s slightly out of phase with its moment. Writing that addresses problems readers don’t quite recognise yet. Writing that tries to create the community that would recognise it as valuable.
But this creates a cruel bind: that writing is most vulnerable to rejection precisely because it doesn’t meet readers where they are. It asks readers to become different kinds of readers. And that’s a hard ask when readers are busy, when they’re trained to scan for value quickly, when they’ll stop reading after two paragraphs if they don’t immediately see why your work matters to them.
So what do you do?
The standard moves are:
- Frame your radical question as an answer to a recognised problem (smuggle in the new under cover of the familiar)
- Build enough legitimacy through conventional work that you’ve earned the right to take risks
- Find the one or two readers who already get it and write for them, hoping they’ll evangelise to others
- Write at the border between fields where neither field fully controls what counts as legitimate questions
All of these can work. All of them are partial solutions.
But I wonder if there’s something else—something about the form itself.
What if you wrote texts that worked at multiple registers simultaneously? Not dumbing down for different audiences, but creating multiple entry points, multiple ways of caring about the question?
A text that could be read by Middle East scholars as a contribution to understanding diaspora. Could be read by urban studies people as a contribution to understanding how cities layer histories. Could be read by anthropologists as a contribution to understanding how people make homes in displacement. Could be read by German studies scholars as a contribution to understanding how Berlin carries its Eastern origins.
Not because you’re diluting each claim to make it palatable to everyone, but because you’re working at a level of complexity where the question genuinely matters across multiple frameworks.
This isn’t the same as interdisciplinary writing that tries to translate between fields. It’s something more like writing that thinks from the border itself—from the place where disciplinary languages break down and you have to find new ways of describing what you’re seeing.
Maybe the “problem” with McEnerney’s framework isn’t that it’s wrong, but that it assumes a stability that doesn’t exist for the most interesting intellectual work. It assumes you can identify your readers, understand their problems, and meet them where they are. But what if the most important work happens precisely when you can’t do that—when you’re writing for a community that doesn’t exist yet, when you’re trying to articulate problems that readers don’t recognize as problems, when you’re pointing to instabilities in the very structure of how we organise intellectual attention?
This isn’t an argument against reader-centered writing. Reader-centered writing is infinitely better – I think! – than ego-centered writing. But maybe we need a more complicated temporality. Maybe we need to ask: reader-centered for which readers? The readers who exist now, or the readers your work is trying to call into being?
And maybe we need forms that can work across that temporal gap—forms that meet some readers where they are while simultaneously inviting other readers to become something different. Forms that serve existing communities while also seeding new ones. Forms that are strategic enough to survive the present moment but ambitious enough to change what the next moment cares about.
I don’t know what those forms look like. I’m watching students walk Berlin, holding tensions that don’t yet have disciplinary homes, and I wonder what it would mean to teach them to write not just for existing readers but for the readers they’re trying to create. Not to abandon readers—that way lies irrelevance—but to understand writing as a practice of community-building rather than just community-serving.
Maybe that’s what all good academic writing has always done, quietly, without theorising it. Maybe the texts we remember aren’t the ones that most efficiently solved recognised problems, but the ones that changed what we thought was worth solving. The ones that created new readers by teaching us to care about questions we didn’t know were questions.
If that’s right, then McEnerney’s framework isn’t wrong—it’s incomplete. Yes, write for readers. Yes, help them understand better. But also: write to create new structures of attention. Write to change what counts as understanding. Write for the readers who will only exist if you write for them.
This is harder. More uncertain. More likely to fail. But maybe also more necessary—especially now, especially at the borders, especially when we’re trying to understand things that exceed the ways we’ve learned to organize knowledge.

