To “put yourself in the position of the reader” requires an empathy, a sensitivity to other minds which can be difficult to train. It’s the phrase I most commonly write in the margin of typescripts that I’m asked to comment on. My own books, by the time they reach publication, have been winnowed through a kind of Darwinian cascade of readings, by me but through the imagined eyes of dozens of others. Automatically, unconsciously, with every reading I find that I’ve inadvertently donned the spectacles of another potential reader, pretty much at random.