Why students say, ‘It makes the reader want to read on’

How the curse of knowledge, the confusion between speech and writing, and a lack of explicit modelling keep students stuck in shallow analysis

One of the most common and irritating responses found strewn across students’ literary or linguistic analysis is the claim that a writer has made a particular choice to “make the reader want to read on.”¹ As far as I’m aware, no English teacher has ever advised students to use this phrase. In fact, many explicitly forbid it. So whence, we might reasonably ask, does this tortured construction originate and what explains its stubborn appeal?

Like many enduring problems in education, the MTRWTRO gambit is not so much wrong as woefully inadequate. The reason students persist in using it - despite their teachers’ scornful admonitions - is because they intuitively know it’s true. In order to understand this impasse, it’s worth considering why it is that so many students end up stuck on horns of this confusing dilemma.

Faced with questions about the purpose of a linguistic or structural feature, students know they’re not supposed to say what seems obvious to them: that no conscious choice was made.Their default assumption is that a writer, like they themselves, will just scribble down the first idea to spring to mind in whatever unfortunate or fortunate manner it occurs to them. This misconception stems from a failure to grasp a fundamental truth about language: that speaking and writing, while superficially similar, are profoundly different acts.

Contrary to popular belief, we do not speak in sentences. Speech is fluid, fragmentary, and context-bound. Listeners rely on shared cues - gesture, intonation, deixis, ellipsis - to fill in the gaps. “You know what I mean?” works in conversation because, miraculously, we often do. Writing, by contrast, strips away this scaffolding. Writer and reader are separated by time, space, and context. This makes clarity and precision not just preferable but crucial. Even when the spatial-temporal separations are tiny (think of the feedback you’ve written in the margins of so many students’ exercise books) meaning can misfire. When the gulf spans cultures or centuries, the potential for misunderstanding multiplies. If we want students to understand why “to make the reader want to read on” is inadequate, they first need to understand all this.

But this is only part of the problem. While students often fail to appreciate the differences between speech and writing, they instinctively know that no one bothers to write something for no reason. The effort required to communicate in writing is too great to be purposeless. They also know - perhaps even more intuitively - that stories are meant to be finished. An unfinished story is like an uneaten meal: a waste. Therefore, just as a cook’s purpose might be said to be to make the eater want to eat on, a writer’s purpose is obviously to make the reader want to read on. This shouldn’t be controversial.

The problem for English teachers is what’s often called the curse of knowledge. This has two parts. First, experts tend to forget how they became experts. Second, they routinely overestimate what novices know. In the context of English teaching, this means two things:

1. Our ability to analyse language has become automatised; we just do it, without always knowing how.

2. Because we no longer recognise the stages we went through to get here, we struggle to explain what now feels obvious to us but remains opaque to our students.

The solution to this - and to many other instructional failures - is to become more conscious of what we don’t know we know. In this case, what many English teachers don’t know is how they came to be able to explain writers’ choices. The unhelpful (but true) answer is that we have internalised thousands of micro-decisions into large, interwoven mental schemata we now think of as skill. But because we don’t remember how this skill formed, we often attempt to teach the skill of analysis without ever attempting to break it back down into its constituent parts.

To help students move beyond the MTRWTRO gambit, we need to do the following:

• Teach the difference between speech and writing. Students must grasp that writing is crafted, purposeful, and context-free in ways speech is not.

• Acknowledge that writers do want readers to keep reading, but emphasise that analysis depends on being able to explain how they achieve that outcome.

• Systematically teach the mechanisms by which writers sustain interest. This includes sentence structure, syntactic deviation, tonal contrast, delayed resolution, enjambment, narrative gaps, and so on. Every student should be taught to ask: 1) What other choices were available? 2) Why might this one have been chosen? 3) What difference does it make to the reader?

• Provide extensive, deliberate practice in articulating these insights in writing. This should focus on sentence-level mastery of analytic constructions—such as subordinating conjunctions to express causality, or apposition to clarify choices, not simply to get it right once, but to continue practising until getting it right becomes inevitable.

Until students can no longer get it wrong, they will default to what feels obvious. And unless we, their teachers, surface the invisible routines that make our knowledge seem intuitive, we’ll continue to watch them fumble through analysis with only the blunt tools of cliché. The challenge is not to ban phrases like “to make the reader want to read on,” but to show why they’re woefully insufficient and to give students the confidence to use effective replacements.

1. Similar phrases crop up in other subjects: History: “because it’s in the source,” RE: “because it’s in the Bible/Koran,” Geography: “Because of climate change,” Art/Design: “Because it looks good.” etc.