If the ultimate goal of academic writing is to convince the audience that a proposed knowledge contribution is valid, then it is essential that writers provide the background information readers need to understand their claims and find them persuasive. Yet, drafting and revision choices that involve orienting the reader can be a struggle for many writers, in large part because judgments about what context readers need heavily depend on the writer’s assumptions about who their readers are. Take, for example, an anthropologist who is writing about dating culture among American Gen Z youth. If they assume that they’re writing for scholars who also work on Gen Z dating culture, they may only need to offer orienting information about US-specific context. By contrast, if they assume that they’re writing for anthropologists who don’t work on dating culture, or for scholars who work on dating culture but aren’t anthropologists, then there will be all sorts of context they’ll need to provide to their presumed readers to make sure they can follow along and be convinced. Thus, writers face a challenging question: How do we determine the right type and amount of orienting information for our intended audience and how do we decide where to include that information?

The revision strategy detailed below is designed to help you answer these questions by clarifying the needs of your intended audiences and then coding the contextual information in your draft to determine where you might need to reposition, expand, or cut it. The goal of this exercise is to determine how to present context for your project most clearly so that readers have the information they need to understand your claims.

Step 1: Identify your intended audiences, including your main audience (e.g. scholars in a specific conversation or subfield) as well as any broader audiences you want to engage (e.g. scholars in your field, scholars in adjacent fields doing interdisciplinary work, or even non-academics invested in similar questions). For each audience, list the background knowledge you expect them to possess and the context you think they might lack.

Note: It might be helpful to use a visualization technique in this step. For instance, you might draw a series of concentric circles and label each audience, putting the audience with the highest level of contextual knowledge in the center and putting audiences that require increasing levels of context in each subsequent ring. Alternatively, you might create a Venn diagram to help you determine what shared knowledge your audiences are likely to have and where they might need different degrees and kinds of context.

Step 2: Read through your project (including the footnotes/endnotes). Highlight sentences where you are giving readers context using color coding to indicate the following categories:

Essential to Main Audience: context essential to your main audience’s understanding of the project. This information should be relatively thorough and go in the body of the text.

Non-Essential to Main Audience/Essential to Broader Audiences: context your main audience is probably familiar with but that your broader audiences likely need to understand and be persuaded by your claim. This information should be relatively concise and/or go in a footnote/endnote.

Redundant: context your main audience and your broader audiences are likely familiar with or that has no relevance to your larger claim. This information should be cut entirely or demoted to a very concise footnote/endnote.

Step 3: Now that you’ve sorted your contextual information into categories, reread each highlighted section and decide whether you need to promote, demote, or cut context.

For essential context, review the notes you made about your main audience in Step 1 and determine if you have provided adequate context. If the background information seems insufficient or incomplete, expand it to ensure readers have the necessary information. If it is currently in a footnote/endnote, promote it into the body of the text.

For non-essential context, rewrite the sentence(s) to be as concise as possible and/or demote that background information to a footnote/endnote. That way, your main audience can choose to read without looking at the footnote/endnote, thus maintaining their flow, while your broader audiences can consult the note to get the background information that they need.

For redundant context, cut the information entirely or demote it to a very concise footnote/endnote.

If you found this promote/demote strategy helpful, you might also look at “Not Sure Whether You Should Paraphrase, Cite, or Block-Quote? Assessing Evidence Length and Detail.”