2.1: Empathy, the Key to Compelling Communication--Reading

When people read your essay, they are constantly judging you, the writer. Are you credible? Are you on their side? Can they trust what you say? Can they relate? Your basic task in creating a persuasive essay is to form a partnership with the reader, and that requires you know you audience as well as you can. Knowing your reader seems like an obvious piece of advice, but it is something many of us do not do thoroughly enough. Occasionally, we do not look at it as a distinct task, and we assume that we already know the audience well enough. Consequently, we should consider this major step in essay writing, why it is important, and how to perform it effectively.

Researching your audience is one your most important first steps, because it should shape your essay’s strategy, research, structure, tone, and word choice. Knowing your readers enables you to determine:

• What information to include and the order in which to share it.
• To decide what NOT to include.
• How to meet your readers’ intellectual and emotional needs.
• How to answer potential questions, anticipate concerns, solve problems, and avoid topics, words, and ideas that some might find offensive.
• The voice you should use to engage your readers and convince them of your credibility.

The wrong word, tone, or approach can undermine your essay’s logic and antagonize your reader. Language has enormous power, because it enables us to connect with the world outside of human consciousness. We can never fully know what is in someone else’s mind or how others see us, but language provides us with a slender bridge to cross that divide if only momentarily. Words can inspire love and provoke anger, speak truth, and disseminate lies, explain mysteries, and engender confusion, provide solace, and intensify despair, define society’s values, and undermine them, and create and destroy civilizations. So, we must handle them gingerly, as if they were a highly unstable, combustible substance for they can ignite controversies if our audience misunderstands our meaning.

For example, many words and phrases we have used casually throughout our lives may, unknown to us, be deeply offensive to others, especially people of different ethnicities, races, sexual orientation, gender, and capabilities. For example,

• OCD—many of us use the acronym for obsessive-compulsive disorder in a self-deprecating way to describe ourselves as overly tidy and organized. However, this practice trivializes a serious mental condition that is challenging to people who suffer from it.
• Smooth Brain—a slang term for stupid. It also is the non-scientific term for lissencephaly, a set of brain disorders in which the surface of the brain appears smooth. Children with this condition often suffer significant developmental delays, and their life expectancy may be shortened.
• Oriental—is considered insulting when used to refer to Asians, because the word is most associated with objects (e.g., oriental rugs). It also hearkens back to a period when racist attitudes toward Asians were even more common than today. Degrading depictions of Asians in popular culture were ubiquitous.

So, knowing your audience is critical to writing compelling essays and navigating your way through the verbal minefield of a diverse society. The writer’s most effective asset in meeting this challenge is cultivating and exercising empathy, which is invaluable to communication and human relationships. Empathy encompasses understanding, awareness, sensitivity, and vicariously imagining the feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences of another—past or present—without having them communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

Our best writers often attribute their success to their skillful use of empathy. Poet Nikki Giovanni downplays the common overused advice to new writers—“write what you know”—and emphasizes the importance of empathy: “Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t . . . If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

Popular author Neil Gaiman, for example, argues, “Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” Gaiman discusses the importance of empathy in writing fiction, but his advice applies to nonfiction as well. Both fiction and non-fiction tell stories, because that is the best way to deliver information. From Homer wandering from campfire to campfire relating tales about the Trojan War and its aftermath to the CEO reporting third quarter results, speakers, novelists, leaders, and reporters use narrative to convey the messages they wish to impart. In “Stories in Our Bones,” Storyteller Dr. Geoff Mead emphasizes that our brains are hardwired for narrative, and he stresses that point by speaking of “an indigenous people whose name for human being, when literally translated, is ‘featherless storytelling creature.’”

Essayist Joan Didion provided one of the best discussions of the importance of narrative in the opening of her essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: 

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. . .. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. 

Our finest novelists are experts in narrative and, as we have seen, they understand that readers prefer characters with whom they can identify. In the same way, when we write an essay, we must be sure that our readers can empathize—as in relate to or identify with—who we are and what we say.

They also value empathy, because it is a critical element of creativity. Notre Dame University Professor Chris Adkins clarifies the links between empathy and creativity in his essay, “How Does Empathy Influence Creativity?”:

Empathy begins with attention. Creativity does too. In both cases, you pay attention to the data you take in. In Latin, attention means to “stretch toward.” When you empathize with someone, you're stretching outside of yourself and stretching into that person's world. This empathy then links to problem-solving because you must first decide not only what the problem is, but who has the problem.

Clearly, there is abundant evidence that empathy is fundamental to knowing your audience, superior writing, and creativity. However, a key question remains; how do we become more empathetic? Writer Claire Cain Miller is a powerful proponent of empathy:

Research has shown that empathy makes people better managers and workers, and better family members and friends. But it’s bigger than just its personal effect. We’re all in this together, and researchers say that connection and compassion are crucial to a sustainable and humane future.

Miller also offers some answers to our final challenge. As part of its A Year of Living Better series, The New York Times published her article “How to Be More Empathetic”, which discusses practical steps to fostering empathy. She recommends a three-step process:

In Step One, you become more attentive to people outside of your social, cultural, and professional group to discover how they think and live.

• Become more attentive to others, especially in conversations. Be careful to observe non-verbal clues.
• Explore unfamiliar environments and cultures through new experiences, such as attending a house of worship of another religion or attending an event of another culture, such as a Pride Parade, a Cinco de Mayo festival, or a Bar/Bat Mitzvah.
• If you find that someone’s behavior, beliefs, or feelings upset you, strive to determine where they are coming from. Consider their backgrounds, their daily challenges, and their past experiences.

In Step Two, intensify your exploration of other perspectives by engaging in activities that take you outside your comfort zone.

• Volunteer for community efforts, such as a community garden, a food pantry, an advocacy group, or a school board. For example, participating in events involving people in need is an excellent way to engage directly with the homeless and others who are economically or socially disadvantaged.
• Recognize that all people including ourselves, are biased. We all grow up in singular environments isolated from other cultures.
• Read books that enable you to discover how others live and think. Research has demonstrated that people who read literary fiction are more empathetic than those who do not. Several medical schools, for example, encourage future physicians to read narrative fiction, because it helps them develop superior bedside manners and diagnostic skills.

In Step Three, engage in rigorous self-evaluation to identify and address your biases and evaluate you progress in becoming more empathetic.

• Since we are often unaware of our own biases, explore ways to discover them. You could take a quiz designed to help you reveal their unconscious biases. Examine your behavior in social situations, think about cultural differences, and how you respond to cultural stimuli.
• Explore these issues:
  • Do you ever contemplate issues related to race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, and access? How often?
  • Do you watch movies, plays, or TV shows or read books that portray people of diverse cultures?
  • Do you ever find yourself in social settings with people who identify differently than you?

Works Cited

Nikki Giovanni quoted in Black Women Writers at Work. Edited by Claudia Tate. Reprinted by Haymarket Books in paperback, January 10, 2023. (The January 1, 1983, original edition is out-of-print.)

https://bookshop.org/p/books/black-w...=9781642598407

Neil Gaiman, “Introduction,” Fahrenheit 451: A Novel by Ray Bradbury, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2013.

Dr. Geoff Mead. “Stories in Our Bones,” Centre for Narrative Leadership. https://hermesconsulting.wordpress.c...-in-our-bones/

Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. New York. 1968.

Chris Adkins, “How does empathy influence creativity?,” “A Scholar’s Perspective”

Claire Cain Miller, “How to Be More Empathetic,” A Year of Living Better, The New York Times. January 31, 2019.