"When you're writing, there is a kind of idealised reader in your mind.
If you are unsure about your actual audience, create a fictional reader in your mind.
Close your eyes, dear reader, and empty your mind.
Wallace and Garner hash out the "lifelong apprenticeship" of language, from big bromides, like "the reader cannot read your mind", to the gritty details of good openers, transitions, and a vocabulary of "elegant variation".
It is also difficult, as a reader, to make up your mind what to think of its subject, Eduard Limonov, because the author, French writer and film director Emmanuel Carrère, cannot make up his mind, either.
While the novels by Mansell and Smith are far apart in literary sensibility, they stand out from the other eight in that they try to make the reader laugh, although Making Your Mind Up includes a character with an inoperable brain tumour and the central joke in On Beauty is essentially literary, reworking EM Forster for modern times.
Make your closing sentence in your essay last in your readers mind.
In fact, there's research that has found that using pencil and paper to write down ideas (and readers questions) opens up your mind and starts your creative process working.
Furthermore, lest our own minds should wander, Betteridge commands the reader pay due attention: "Clear your mind of the children, or the dinner, or the new bonnet, or what not … and don't I know how ready your attention is to wander when it's a book that asks for it, instead of a person?" (Comfortable in your corner of the beach, you might just be thinking about bonnets).
For those high school students in India, or in other countries, who may be headed to college in the United States or considering such a move, here are some tips for managing your time and generally not losing your mind: Do readers of The Choice on India Ink have time-management tips of their own to add? Please use the comment box below to let us know.
