Who are you writing for?

Address yourself to your particular ‘public’, often called your discourse community. This is basic advice that is often ignored. You would not write a class essay in the same way as you would write a message to a friend or a review on a social network; you would modify important aspects of your text, such as level of formality, choice of vocabulary, the structure of sentences and paragraphs, possibly even the use of what are called apparatus (footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies). In other words, you would make decisions based on who you are writing for.  

Your final project is aimed at a specific academic community and so it needs to respect and conform to certain requirements. These include the obvious questions just mentioned, but they also include making reference to the main ideas that are current in your own field regarding your topic and locating your subject in an ongoing current of critical debate.

Exemple adequatThere are over 16,000 academic studies on Abraham Lincoln, covering a broad range of topics such as his life, his political and historical contexts and his own social views. However, as this final project concerns Lincoln’s political difficulties during the US Civil War (1861–1865), the arguments made here are based, fundamentally, on three major studies of this subject: Herman Belz’s Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era (1998); Jonathan W. White’s Abraham Lincoln and Treason in the Civil War (2011); and T. Harry Williams’s now dated but still essential Lincoln and His Generals (1967). These three works, above all others, have set down the main lines of discussion in this area.
Darrera actualització: 13-6-2022
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Recommended citation:
«Who are you writing for?» [en línia]. A: Llibre d’estil de la Universitat de Barcelona. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona. Serveis Lingüístics. <https://www.ub.edu/llibre-estil/criteri.php?id=3461> [consulta: 19 abril 2024].
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