Description

It’s indispensable for an author to know who the audience is. Depending upon the audience, an author might take one or another tack in explaining her position. (See also section 3.)
A student is not in the typical position of an author for many reasons. While an author usually chooses her intended audience, the student’s audi-ence is imposed on her. (The student’s predicament, however, is not unique. An audience usually chooses his author. In contrast, the professor’s author is imposed on him: his students. Both should make the best of necessity.) Unless the student is exceptional, she is not writing to inform or convince her audience of the truth of the position she expostulates. So her purpose is not persuasion. Further, unless the topic is exceptional or the professor relatively ignorant, the student’s purpose is not straightforwardly exposi-tive or explanatory either. Presumably, the professor already understands the material that the student is struggling to present clearly and correctly. Nonetheless, the student cannot presuppose that the professor is knowl-edgeable about the topic being discussed because the professor, in his role as judge, cannot assume that the student is knowledgeable. It is the student’s job to show her professor that she understands what the professor already knows. A student may find this not merely paradoxical but perverse. But this is the existential situation into which the student as author is thrown.
The structure and style of a student’s essay should be the same as an essay of straightforward exposition and explanation. As mentioned above, the student’s goal is to show the professor that she knows some philo-sophical doctrine by giving an accurate rendering of it; further, the stu-dent must show that she knows, not simply what propositions have been espoused by certain philosophers, but why they hold them. That is, the student must show that she knows the structure of the arguments used to prove a philosophical position, the meaning of the technical terms used and the evidence for the premises. (One difference between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas is that the former cares about the structure and cogency of the arguments.) The student needs to assume (for the sake of adopting an appropriate authorial stance) that the audi-ence is (a) intelligent but (b) uninformed. The student must state her the-sis and then explain what she means. She must prove her thesis or at least provide good evidence for it.
All technical terms have to be explained as if the audience knew little or no philosophy. This means that the student ought to explain them by using ordinary words in their ordinary senses. If the meaning of a technical term is not introduced or explained by using ordinary words in their ordinary meanings, then there is no way for the audience to know what the author means. For example, consider this essay fragment:

The purpose of this essay is to prove that human beings never perceive material objects but rather semi‐ideators, by which I mean the interface of the phenomenal object and its conceptual content.

This passage should sound profound for no more than a nano‐second. In theory, there is nothing objectionable to introducing the term semi‐ideator, but anyone with the gall to invent such a neologism owes the reader a better explanation of its meaning than “the interface of the phenomenal object and its conceptual content.” In addition to neologisms, words with ordinary meanings often have technical meanings in philosophy, e.g.:

determined
matter
ego
universal
reflection
pragmatic

When an author uses a word with an ordinary meaning in an unfamiliar technical sense, the word is rendered ambiguous, and the audience will be misled or confused if that technical meaning is not noted and explained in terms intelligible to the audience.
It is no good to protest that your professor should permit you to use technical terms without explanation on the grounds that the professor knows or ought to know their meaning. To repeat, it is not the profes-sor’s knowledge that is at issue, but the student’s. It is her responsibility to show the professor that she knows the meaning of those terms. Do not think that the professor will think that you think that the professor does not understand a term if you define it. If you use a technical term, then it is your term and you are responsible for defining it. Further, a technical term is successfully introduced only if the explanation does not depend on the assumption that the audience already knows the meaning of the technical term! For that is precisely what the student has to show.
There is an exception. For advanced courses, the professor may allow the student to assume that the audience knows what a beginning student might know about philosophy, perhaps some logic or parts of Plato’s Republic or Descartes’s Meditations, or something similar. For graduate students, the professor may allow the student to assume a bit more logic, and quite a bit of the history of philosophy. It would be nice if the profes-sor were to articulate exactly what a student is entitled to assume and what not, but he may forget to do this, and, even if he remembers, it is virtually impossible to specify all and only what may be assumed. There is just too much human knowledge and ignorance and not enough time to articulate it all. If you are in doubt about what you may assume, you should ask. Your professor will probably be happy to tell you. If he is not, then the fault lies with him; and you can rest content with the knowledge that, in asking, you did the right thing. That is the least that acting on principle gives us; and sometimes, alack, the most.
While I have talked about who your audience is and about how much or how little you should attribute to him, I have not said anything about what attitude you should take toward the audience. The attitude is respect. If you are writing for someone, then you should consider that person wor-thy of the truth; and if that person is worthy of the truth, then you should try to make that truth as intelligible and accessible to him as possible. Further, if you write for an audience, you are putting demands on that person’s time. You are expecting him to spend time and to expend effort to understand what you have written; if you have done a slipshod job, then you have wasted his time and treated him unfairly. A trivial or sloppy essay is an insult to the audience in addition to reflecting badly on you. If a professor is disgruntled when he returns a set of essays, it may well be because he feels slighted. A good essay is a sign of the author’s respect for the audience.