Samantha Laine Perfas interviews Leonard Cassuto in The Harvard Gazette:
You start your book by pointing out that all academic writers begin their careers writing for one person: their teacher. Why does that create problems?
This is the primal scene of academic writing: some student writing some paper for some teacher someplace. It happens again and again and is the process by which we are socialized into the community of academic writers.
The distinguishing feature of that primal scene is one that I think gets very little attention, namely that the reader (in this case the teacher) is being paid. You grow up as a writer where your audience is one who can never be bored or discouraged because they’re being paid to read to the end of it. You’re learning in some sense that the reader doesn’t matter that much and that they’re going to be with you no matter what.
This is inevitably the root of many potential bad habits, which can burst into flower as writers become more and more advanced.
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