If you were writing a report, or a newspaper or magazine article, or a book an important consideration would be who is the audience for this. Even before you started writing you would want to have in mind who would read it. If you were creating a sales pitch to get an editor to commission your piece, you would even have in mind what the editor saw their audience to be. While you wrote you would try to keep in mind what the level of knowledge and what are the interests of the people you are writing for. What do they know already? What do they need to know? Who are they?

Often students don’t think this way about their essays. This is largely because your essay is not for public consumption. Most undergraduate essays are not published; meaning they are not made public (the clue is in the word). Most essays will have a double existence: first in the archives of the university and second in a pile of papers you put away thinking that one day you might come back to that. The university archive is just in case there is some future dispute; for academic misconduct or checking. Eventually they will be pulped. Your own personal archive may last may years. Eventually it is likely that you will clear your essays away as you are clearing house.

Of course this is not always the case. Hopefully, you will show it to friends and family to solicit their feedback. And if it is good enough you may well try to get it out there – though depending on where you want it shown you may want to edit it.

, but it is far from being a private or personal affair. However, to consider your essay as simply a private exercise is missing the point.

An essay should be no different. Before you start writing ask yourself this: “who are you writing this for?”

Should you write the essay for you?

It is practice to enable you to produce works worthy of public consumption in the future.

When a book, a magazine or a newspaper article is being created the author may be writing it for themselves.

Imagine It is not meant to go in a gallery, but it is meant to get you towards that goal – towards public exposure.

But they can be.