5/9 Response

"But in my experience, I find that teachers do a disservice when we fail to alert students to the kind of things that some readers might be annoyed at—however illogical these things sometimes seem. People are often unreasonably picky, and writers have to deal with that—which they do by trying to anticipate and preemptively fix whatever might annoy a broad range of readers. Plus, the more effectively you anticipate that pickiness, the more likely it is that readers will interpret your quota- tions and paraphrases in the way you want them to—critically or acceptingly, depending on your writing context."

This quote can be found at the bottom of the second page of Stedman's article, about halfway through the last paragraph. I really like the second half of the first sentence when Stedman includes the bit, "however illogical these things sometimes seem." I think often times there are things that may annoy some readers but not all, and they might be for reasons that the author doesn't find logical. Regardless of whether or not the author thinks its logical, he doesn't want to confuse or annoy his readers, because it will be much tougher for them to be able to engage themselves in the reading if this is the case. I also thought it was important that the author mentioned anticipating this pickiness before publishing a piece of work, because your almost never going to get a second chance from a reader if the first article they read by you confused them. Most times you get one chance and that's it, so if you confuse them the first time you can't simply go back and re-write an article a different way in hopes of regaining their attention, which is why it's so important to be aware of the conventions you may be using and how they can confuse or annoy certain readers. And or course, if your writing is too confusing, the reader may not be able to follow your writing at all, and not really able to make sense of what your trying to get across, which would be almost a total failure.