Compare these two scenarios:

In Scenario 2, Hassan’s off to a much better start. What’s the difference? In the second scenario, rather than asking Hassan what he wants to say about the minimum wage, Aisha asks him about the specific end goal of this paper: “Who’s your reader, and what do you want them to learn from your paper?”

The strategy of starting from the end goal and working backwards has a name in teaching and learning theory: “Backward Design.” The basic principle of Backward Design is very simple: start by establishing what you want people to know or understand by the end of the lesson, and then work out how to get there.  Rather than asking “what do I know about this topic and how can I teach it to my students,” a teacher using Backward Design principles will ask “what do my students need to know about this topic and how will I know if they’ve learned it?”^[1]

OK, so what does this discussion of teaching, learning, and Backward Design have to do with writing? The dialogues above show the power of switching to a Backwards Design model for writing. Rather than asking “what do I want to say about this subject,” ask “what do I want my reader to learn from this paper?” This approach implies two other questions: “Who is my intended reader, and what information does this specific reader need in order to follow my argument?”

Let’s revisit Scenario 1 with these questions in mind and help Hassan break the “I know what I want to say, I just don’t know how to say it” loop by introducing him to Backward Design.

Hassan’s project was transformed from “talking about how the minimum wage should be higher” to “teaching a reader who believes that raising the minimum wage would be unaffordable and/or would raise taxes too high that neither of these fears is actually true.” Knowing his reader’s start and end points (what they believe before and after reading this paper) has taken the job of the paper from a very general “talk about ______” (which has no start or end point, and therefore no clear pathway) to a very specific “teach a reader who currently believes ____________ that the truth is really ___________ (which has a very clear start and end point, and therefore a pathway).

But here is a truth about thesis writing that should come as a huge relief: starting with your reader and what they need will basically write the thesis for you; as soon as you figure out this reader and their endpoint and starting point, the thesis just happens.

Hassan’s original thesis was “The minimum wage should be higher” (which, as we saw, leaves him with no clear beginning or end, and therefore not sense of the pathway of the paper). His newer paper’s thesis would more like, “While some may worry that raising the minimum wage would be unaffordable or present too big a tax burden, this paper will present evidence that neither of these assumptions is true.” Hassan really didn’t have to “come up with” the second thesis because that thesis emerged out of the understanding of the end goal of the paper, which was to take a reader who currently believed ________ and help them realize ________.

Research writers in any field – from economics to communication to history to health science – don’t sit there and “come up with” a thesis for their published papers. Instead, their ideas emerge out of a response to what other people in their field have been doing. So, if an economist were writing about raising the minimum wage, she would only write this because others in her field were publishing arguments against raising it. She knows what she needs to write because of what she sees others in her field saying.

To Recap:

A Backward Design approach has you begin with the end goal of your paper, which means that you start by developing a clear sense of what you want your reader to know or realize by the end of your paper. The unspoken part of this process is that you can’t know what this reader needs or how to teach it to them unless you also know where they are now – what their current understanding of your topic is. So, you just make that decision: are you writing to someone who believes there should be no minimum wage? If so, then (a) your paper’s goal will now be to help them realize that there indeed should be a minimum wage; and (b) your research goal is to find the best evidence to take this reader to this realization. If you decide that most people really do believe there should be a minimum wage, but many want it to stay under $10 (for example), then your paper’s goal would now be to help this reader realize that it should be higher; and your research goal is to find the best evidence to make this specific job happen.

Once you know the starting point and the endpoint, you have all of the key ingredients of the paper: the thesis has already been developed, and the questions about how to get the reader from their starting point to that endpoint can all be answered by relying upon your existing sense of how to help anyone who needs to learn something that you already know.