When I work with students in conferences I spend most of my time helping them unearth and add details, helping them identify areas needing further development. While we are struggling to make sentences and structure our paragraphs, it`s easy to forget that when we finish writing, we are going to give the product to a reader. We are inside of our essays. Our readers are standing outside of our essays trying to get in. What this means is that as writers we lived the events we are describing and felt the emotions we are trying to relate, but that our readers aren`t PRIVY to the full contexts our writing springs from. They weren`t there and they didn`t feel the emotions. It is our job as writers to find a way to draw them in and help them see, feel and ultimately understand what we experienced or believe.
When we aren`t mindful of our reader, our writing tends to be under cooked and STERILE because we are then only operating out of our own private spheres. We don`t need the details because we already have them living in our heads.

Writing for yourself is fine and wonderful, but this is not the kind of writing our college courses and our jobs require. In college, and in the work place, we will usually be writing for an outside reader, and as soon as I write for a reader who is unfamiliar with me or my subject matter I have new responsibilities. When I write for an audience I must work very hard to ensure that everything I write has a clearly recognizable point of REFERENCE and is ADORNED with enough details and examples to be clear.

One of the truly important writing skills is the ability to anticipate what this outside reader is going to need from you in order to understand you. You need to learn how to write from a reader`s PERSPECTIVE. Try to EMPATHI