Lighthouse Thinking: Writing for Readers, Not Reputation
Moving from self-conscious to reader-focused writing
One of the biggest hang-ups I see with academic writers has very little to do with skill, intelligence, or even training. It has to do with who they imagine is reading their work.
Who’s on the other side of the page when you sit down to write?
Is it a sharp-elbowed reviewer just waiting to tear your argument apart? A senior scholar who already knows more than you do? A committee, a field, an imagined crowd of skeptics who will notice every gap, every imprecision, every missing citation?
If so, it makes perfect sense that writing feels slow, heavy, and tense. When we imagine a hostile or hypercritical audience, we start belaboring every sentence. We hedge. We qualify. We over-explain. We try to preempt every possible objection before we’ve even finished saying what we actually think.
I’ve talked about this dynamic before here:
But it’s worth returning to because it shows up so consistently in my coaching work. When writers imagine a more engaged, curious, and fundamentally friendly audience—readers who are interested in the problem, open to the argument, and excited to see where the thinking goes—the writing almost always loosens. It flows more freely. Decisions come more easily. The work starts to sound like a person thinking on the page instead of a defense brief.
Another version of the same problem shows up when writers imagine too broad an audience.
We write as if we need to satisfy everyone who might possibly read the book or article. We try to anticipate every subfield, every theoretical orientation, and every potential objection from readers who are not, in truth, our readers at all. But no academic book, or article, or chapter, can do that. And trying to write as if it could sets you up for failure before you begin.
Narrowing your audience isn’t about dumbing your work down or making it smaller. It’s about making it decidable. When you know who you’re writing for, it becomes much easier to decide what to include, what to leave out, what to explain carefully, and what you can reasonably assume.
I recently realized that another mindset shift can have a significant impact on both the amount of anxiety some writers feel and the reader's experience.
I was listening to an unrelated podcast episode about public speaking, and the guest said something about audiences that really resonated.
She suggested that if you're nervous about speaking in front of a large group of people, try shifting your focus to being a lighthouse instead of a spotlight. Then she explained the metaphor:
A spotlight asks, ‘What does everyone think of me?’
A lighthouse asks, ‘What does the audience need from me?’
I immediately thought about so many of you, my dear readers and clients.
So much of what makes writing feel fraught comes from spotlight thinking. We worry about how smart we sound. What it says about us if we cite one theorist instead of another. How our argument positions us politically, intellectually, and professionally. Whether the work will “hold up” under scrutiny—and what that scrutiny will say about us.
That kind of self-focus doesn’t just increase anxiety. It also pulls our attention inward in a way that makes the writing worse. To put it a bit too directly, it can tip into a kind of professional narcissism: the work becomes primarily about how we are perceived, rather than what we are offering to the world of ideas.
What if what you’re writing isn’t meant to say anything about you at all? What if it’s meant to do something for a reader?
To be clear: academic reputations do matter. Writing is tied to jobs, tenure, promotion, and funding. I’m not pretending otherwise, and I’m certainly not suggesting we slip on rose-colored glasses. But I also know that one of the biggest blocks to progress I see in academic writers is thinking too much about what the writing means about you and not enough about what it does for someone else.
We don’t have to be fixated so intently on the imagined critics. We don’t need to worry constantly about the hostile reviewer. Instead, we can imagine a more generous group of readers: people who find the problem interesting, who are genuinely curious about your approach, and who might cite the work, teach it, or use it to think differently about something they already care about.
What would it be like to write with their experience in mind? To imagine a reader encountering a new pattern of thought because of the work you’ve done—and taking pleasure in that moment of recognition? To imagine clarity as a form of generosity rather than a vulnerability?
One effect I would anticipate from lighthouse thinking is a lowering of the anxiety around what your writing says about your reputation.
In its place, there’s more room to write toward someone: to explain, guide, and illuminate. I also think this shift tends to make writing clearer. When you step outside yourself and ask what the experience will be like for another person, fuzzy passages become more visible. Overcomplication starts to feel unnecessary. You’re no longer proving your worth; instead, you’re helping someone think.
That’s lighthouse thinking.
And for many academic writers, it’s not a change in ability that unlocks progress—it’s a change in who they imagine is reading and why they’re writing for them in the first place.