How to know your reader (and become an Unreasonable Writer)

In the 1970s, the cultural critic Umberto Eco published his famous essay "The Role of the Reader". Eco argued that the reader's job was not just to consume texts and precisely decode the creator's intended meaning, but to create meaning via an active process of interpretation. The author's job is to consider a variety of possible readers, understanding that different people likely have different interpretative codes and will therefore find very different meanings.

Because there's no way to reader-proof your writing by forcing everyone to read it in the same way, everybody involved in the publishing process needs to have in mind a core 'model reader' - an idea of the kind of person they especially want to reach and touch and persuade.