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The Readers Who Don’t Exist Yet: A Problem with Problems

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.

The Comfort of Context: A Critical Self-Reflection on Academic Writing’s Addiction to Background

As I sit here, staring at yet another introduction that begins with “Scholars have long debated…”, I find myself confronting again something uncomfortable about academic writing—our peculiar addiction to creating stability through excessive background and definitions, a practice that actually undermines the very purpose of scholarly discourse. This compulsive need to establish firm ground before making any claims reveals something essential about our relationship with academic writing and perhaps our own insecurities as scholars: We build elaborate foundations of context not because our readers need them, but because we need them, like a security blanket that shields us from the vulnerability of making bold claims in an intellectual landscape where critique is currency.

The ritualism of the academic introduction has become so deeply ingrained in our scholarly consciousness that we barely question its necessity anymore—especially when teaching academic writing to graduates. We meticulously lay out historical trajectories, carefully define every term as if our readers were novices in their own field, and construct elaborate methodological fortresses—all before daring to merely whisper what we actually want to say. This performance of erudition, while comforting to write, creates a peculiar form of what I would call intellectual procrastination. Instead of engaging directly with the tensions and problems that make our research vital, we spend precious pages establishing our membership in the academic club through citation parades and definitional displays. It’s as if we believe our readers won’t trust us to challenge existing knowledge until we’ve proven we can recite it verbatim.

Perhaps most telling is our collective resistance to abandoning these practices even when we intellectually understand their limitations. We know our readers—they are often accomplished scholars in their fields unless we cater our texts explicitly to other audiences—don’t need a Wikipedia-style overview of basic concepts. We recognize that starting with “Since ancient times…” rarely serves any purpose beyond demonstrating our ability to use JSTOR. Yet time and again, we find ourselves falling back into these patterns, like comfort food for the academic soul. This behavior suggests something more than mere habit; it reveals our deep-seated anxiety about academic authority and our place within scholarly discourse. Each carefully constructed paragraph of background becomes a talisman against potential criticism, a way of saying “Look how thoroughly I’ve done my homework!” before daring to contribute an original thought—if at all.

The irony, of course, is that this obsession with stability and stasis often achieves the opposite of its intended effect. Rather than strengthening our arguments, these lengthy preambles dilute them. Rather than engaging our readers, they exhaust them. Rather than demonstrating our mastery of the field, they suggest we’re not confident enough in our contributions to let them stand on their own merits. The real intellectual courage lies perhaps not in proving we know everything that’s come before, but in daring to challenge it directly, to create productive instability that advances our understanding. When we finally do allow ourselves to write introductions that foreground problems rather than background, that challenge assumptions rather than recite them, we often find our writing becoming not just more engaging but more honest about what we’re actually trying to accomplish in our research.

Breaking free from this addiction to context requires more than just technical writing advice—it demands a shift in how we conceive of our relationship with our readers and our role in academic discourse. Instead of viewing our introductions as credentialing exercises, we might reimagine them as invitations to productive discomfort, to the kind of intellectual instability that generates new insights. This means trusting our readers enough to skip the historical tours and definitional parades, and trusting ourselves enough to make bold claims without first constructing elaborate defensive fortifications. Only then might we transform our academic writing from exercises in stability-building to genuine contributions to knowledge that challenge, provoke, and advance our understanding.

Writing, Beyond Background

A Self-Learning Session on Breaking Academic Writing Habits (60 minutes)

STEP 1: Examining Our Academic Security Blankets (15 minutes)

READ these common introduction patterns, reflecting on how often you’ve used them:

Pattern 1: The Historical Journey “Since ancient times, humans have…” “Scholars have long debated…” “The history of [field] shows…”

Pattern 2: The Definition Cascade “Before proceeding, we must define…” “X can be understood as…” “This paper uses Y to mean…”

Pattern 3: The Method Shield “Using qualitative methods…” “Through a mixed-methods approach…” “By applying framework Z…”

Pattern 4: The Citation Club “Smith (2010) argues that…” “Building on Jones’ (2015) framework…” “As numerous scholars have shown (Wilson 2018; Brown 2020)…”

TASK 1: Personal Inventory Write down:

  • Which patterns do you most frequently use in your writing?
  • What makes these patterns feel safe or necessary?
  • When you read others’ work, how do you react to these patterns?
  • What are you trying to prove by using these structures?

STEP 2: Understanding the Psychology of Stability (15 minutes)

READ this reflection: “We construct elaborate backgrounds not because our readers need them, but because we need them. Every definition becomes a shield, every citation a membership card to the academic club. But what if our desire for stability is precisely what prevents us from making meaningful contributions?”

TASK 2: Analyze Your Own Writing

Take a recent introduction you’ve written and:

  1. Highlight every sentence that:
    • Provides historical context
    • Defines terms
    • Reviews literature
    • Describes methods
  2. For each highlighted section, ask:
    • Does this advance my argument?
    • Does this create value for my readers?
    • Could I remove this without losing anything essential?
    • What am I afraid would happen if I cut this?

STEP 3: From Stability to Productive Discomfort (15 minutes)

TASK 3: Transform These Stable Introductions into Problem-Centered Ones

Example: STABLE: “Migration studies has long examined cultural integration in urban spaces. Scholars have defined integration through various lenses, from economic to social factors. This paper uses ethnographic methods to study Berlin’s Turkish Market…”

UNSTABLE: “The celebrated ‘success story’ of Berlin’s Turkish Market masks a troubling paradox: while we praise its cultural authenticity, we simultaneously expect it to adapt to German urban norms. This tension reveals how current frameworks for understanding cultural integration fundamentally misread the dynamic nature of immigrant spaces…”

Now try these:

  1. Transform a historical opening into a current problem
  2. Replace a definition cascade with a conceptual challenge
  3. Convert a methodology shield into a problem-solving approach

STEP 4: Testing Your Transformations (15 minutes)

For each rewritten introduction, ask:

  • Does it create immediate tension?
  • Would readers in your field care about this problem?
  • Does it challenge existing understanding?
  • Does it promise valuable insights?

Final Reflection: Consider how different your writing feels when you:

  • Start with instability rather than stability
  • Challenge rather than reinforce existing knowledge
  • Focus on problems rather than background
  • Trust your readers’ expertise

Homework: Take the introduction of your current project and:

  1. Identify all stability-creating elements
  2. Remove or transform each one
  3. Foreground the key problem or tension
  4. Test whether each sentence creates value for your readers

Remember: Your goal isn’t to prove you’ve done your homework – it’s to show readers why they should care about your work right now.