"Best Readers"' General Characteristics for Each English 105 Paper Project
Product Purchase Recommendation: Your readers know and use the kind of product you will recommend, and this creates a clear set of requirements they demand of an acceptable, better, or best product for those purposes. Begin with their needs and work through the products' key features that meet those needs. Tell them nothing "for general background" or "to capture their interest." They know the general background and already are interested. In those ways they differ from the "general audience" or "anyone who might read the paper." Because it is a paper for English 105, they will expect you to use Modern Language Association (MLA) format.
Hawthorne Project: Your readers have read the stories you have read, and probably know the more commonly read novels by Hawthorne. They know who Hawthorne was, in general, and have a basic understanding of American colonial and C19 history. They have not read those stories as closely as you have read them, nor have they studied carefully any of the following areas of specialist knowledge you might have acquired: Hawthorne's publishing history; the stories' publication history; Hawthorne's journals; scholarly research on New England's colonial or C19 history; Hawthorne's moral, social and political beliefs, or those of his contemporaries, Emerson, Poe, Melville, and Thoreau. Because you are writing a paper for English 105 on a humanities topic, they will expect you to use Modern Language Association (MLA) format.
Film Noir Project: Your readers have viewed Casablanca and The Third Man, and they know what film noir is, in general terms. They probably believe Casablanca has nothing to do with film noir but they also probably know The Third Man is considered early film noir. They know Michael Curtiz, Carol Reed, and Orson Welles are famous twentieth-century film directors, but they probably have not seen all their films or considered the films the actors worked in immediately before these two movies. They definitely have not studied individual shot frames, complete shots, scenes or shot sequences, scripts or shooting scripts of either movie. They know Graham Greene is a novelist, but they probably have not read his novel adaptation of The Third Man. They will not have studied lighting, camera technique, costume design, acting, film editing/montage, or any other specialized film studies topics you might have investigated. Because you are writing a paper for English 105 on a humanities topic, they will expect you to use Modern Language Association (MLA) format.
Independent Research Project Report: Your readers are scholars in the field you are researching, but they are not specialists in the specific problem that you have chosen to examine, nor will they be fully aware of the latest research by specialists you have consulted on that problem. They will know the basic expert vocabulary of the field, which means you can use terms of art from the field without defining them unless the terms were only very recently invented, or unless experts debate the terms you use. If that is the case, you must define the terms in an endnote/footnote, or discuss the debate about the terms, either in the main body of your text if it is central to your work, or in an endnote/footnote if the debate can safely be put to one side once it has been acknowledged. Your readers will expect you to use the documentation format they use: humanities--Modern Language Association (MLA) format except University of Chicago for Philosophy, History, Art History, and some other fields; social sciences--American Psychological Association (APA) format; natural sciences--Council of Science Editors (CSE) format. When in doubt, follow the format your sources' articles use most often.