Image description: A green Volkswagen Beetle is parked on the side of a gravel road in a flat, remote area. The car is facing the camera and neon green—decorated with orange spikes and bumps to resemble a dinosaur. Two people sit inside the car, smiling and wearing colorful sunglasses. Photo credit: Gratisography.
As a scholarly author, you are also a guide.
Accompany your readers on their journey through your manuscript. Give them the tools they need to stay by your side till the end!
Here are three easy tips that help your readers follow the storyline you’ve crafted.
Tip 1: Don’t obligate readers to memorize unnecessary details.
Be careful with how many acronyms you expect them to remember. It is common practice to write out a compound term in full the first time and then use the acronym for every instance thereafter, but this doesn’t always make sense for reader accessibility.
If you only reference the “Indus Wars Treaty” a handful of times in a chapter, is that really enough for a reader to hold the meaning of “IWT” in their head as they read?
Tip 2: Tell readers what they should take away from your evidence.
If you’re including a figure in your manuscript, don’t let it stand on its own. Refer to Figure X in the body of your text, introduce it for the reader—and tell them what’s important about the figure, how it advances your section or chapter argument.
Model: Figure 5.2 is a recipe for kimchi published in the 1992 Wives of Methodist Ministers Cookbook and reflects how Koreans’ increased participation in the United Methodist Church mapped onto the eating habits of white, midwestern U.S. Americans.
Tip 3: Advise readers what to expect.
A signposting paragraph is helpful way to tell the readers what’s to come and how the sections support the chapter argument and perhaps even the broader significance of the chapter. This paragraph appears at the end of the introduction and before the main body of the manuscript.
Model: This chapter consists of three sections, each dedicated to a poem written by contemporary Palestinians of the diaspora about the centrality of the sickle to the country’s agriculture. This analysis provides the scaffolding for the chapter argument […] and positions Palestinian poets as cultural workers [doing x] beyond nation-state borders.
You are both author and guide. Be gentle on your readers as you lead them through a storyline that, while familiar to you, is new to them.