Josh Bernoff, who wrote Writing Without Bullshit, had a suggestion for anyone about to start drafting. Work out your ROAM first. What’s ROAM I hear you ask? Well, it’s a set of questions.

• R is for Readers: who is your reader? 
• O is for Objective: how will you change the reader?
• A is for Action: What do you want the reader to do once they have read what you have written? And then 
• M is for iMpression: what will the reader think of you afterwards? 

Bernoff suggests you put all four answers into a single sentence before you write a word of your first draft. After reading this piece, ( readers) will realise (objective), so they will do (action), and think of me as (impression).

ROAM is essentially a marketing tool. Bernoff spent years writing for executives who would not read past a first line unless it offered something useful. But even though ROAM is built for a commercial world, it is worth having a little play with. 

Academic writers do not always start where Bernoff starts. We start with the topic, or with the data we have generated, or with the contribution we think we can make to the literature. The reader turns up later. In contrast, ROAM puts the reader first and keeps them there.

Let’s start with the R. Who are our readers? Writing for a reader changes what and how you compose sentences and organise your text. Think of the differences between writing for the imaginary colleague who will enjoy your argument, or the busy editor deciding whether to send your paper out for review, or the researcher from a different field who needs things you take for granted explained. Each reader will need a slightly different piece. It’s a mistake to write for an average of all of them.

But there’s another reason to consider readers, and it’s about watching your back. Our first and very consequential readers are often gatekeepers. The examiners. The two anonymous reviewers. Understanding who these readers are and what they are expecting is important. A journal article methods section written for a sceptical reviewer who is hunting for the hole in your design reads differently from one written for nobody in particular. The difference is that writing for Reviewer 2 anticipates the objection. Writing for no-one in particular means you are actually just waiting to see if you will be caught out. 

The O is a question that separates a paper that reports from a paper that argues. “What is my paper about?” is an easy and slightly useless question. “How will my reader think differently once they have finished reading? ” is a harder and far more demanding ask. It forces you to decide what the reader currently knows and believes and what you intend to shift. A lot of drafts get stalled here. They describe a study faithfully and never settle on what the reader is supposed to do with it. The O helps clarify the point you want to make. ( This is another way to focus on the contribution you are making.)

The A asks what the reader will do once they have read the text you have produced. This question rubs up against the So What and Now What of the paper. What action does and can a journal article ask of its reader? Often nothing that the writer can be OK with. Cite me?  Use my method?  Teach the concept? Change a policy that you have no power to change? These actions are diffuse and mostly out of your hands. But if you cannot say what you want the reader to do, it is worth asking whether you have a “So What” at all, or only a “Here is what I did”. Fortunately, a scholarly action does not have to be grand. It can be as modest as wanting the reader to stop using a particular term loosely. Or understanding the topic a little differently. But there’s nothing wrong with stating the implications for other actors too. And it does really matter in your conclusion if you can state your So What.  

The M is the question academics are pretty familiar with. What impression will the reader have of me? This concern is part and parcel of being a contemporary scholar. We end up worrying about looking credible and current, about not being caught out, about whether the hedging makes us sound careful or merely nervous. ROAM does something quite helpful here. It makes the impression a decision you make, rather than a worry. You get to choose what authority you are claiming, whether you are a careful empiricist, a bold theorist, a trusted synthesiser. Then you write toward it.  Instead of qualifying every sentence in case someone thinks you have overreached, you write to the impression you want to create. The fretting probably doesn’t disappear, but it does have somewhere to go.

Bernoff’s single sentence is also pretty useful. You can write it out before you draft. Amend it as you go along. The ROAM sentence may not survive the drafting process, in the same way as an early  thesis statement gets deleted once the argument has learned to carry itself. That’s fine because the job of the ROAM sentence is to steer what you write. It never makes an actual appearance in the text. All its work is behind the scenes. When a paragraph starts wandering, you can check it against the sentence. Does this sentence move the reader toward the objective, or is it here because I just couldn’t bear to cut it? ROAM helps you revise and refine.

But there are two big caveats about the Bernhoff ROAM framing. First. The Action and the iMpression carry a logic of persuasion and self-promotion that sits oddly in scholarly conversations, where the convention is to act as if the writer has no stake in what the reader thinks or does with the text. We all have to decide on how much self promotion we do. But you can detach ROAM from this kind of performativity and adapt it to suit our/your own scholarly purposes. Second. It can be very counter-productive to focus on the reader at the start of the writing process. It may very well be better for you to just focus on getting the topic and argument sorted out first of all. Like all writing strategies, ROAM is a resource which is helpful sometimes but not every time. Play with ROAM to sort out when and how it might work for you.

This post is dedicated to the late Professor Raul Pachego-Vega who loved a good acronym, a tidy desk, a notebook, a fountain pen and this book in particular. I miss your posts Raul and your generous engagement with all things writing. 

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash