Expectations: Teaching Writing from the Reader's Perspective

This instructor resource approaches the teaching of writing by focusing on readers' expectations, explaining the perceptive patterns that readers follow in their interpretive process.

Examining reader expectations, this text argues that the structural location of a word is often more important than word choice in a reader's interpretation of a piece of writing. Expectations shows how readers gather contextual clues based not on what specific words mean, but on where those words appear in the structure of a sentence or paragraph. It then discusses how to bring these intuitive processes to conscious thought, allowing students to understand and control how readers perceive their writing.