Because words are not containers of meaning, a reader must interpret (make meaning from) the words in a text (being read).

The Reader as Monarch

In a world where meaning cannot be conveyed by words, the reader is Queen (or King), and

• a writer can only hope to guide the target audience toward the meaning the writer intended the reader(s) to make (in order to achieve the desired consequence for a particular instance of writing).

Writers cannot control the meaning-making processes of readers,

• yet writers can manage those (meaning-making) processes through careful decisions about:
  • word choice (diction)
  • sentence structure (including punctuation), and
  • paragraph structure (including length), and
  • other discourse conventions