Casting the reader

A review needs a reader, and "the audience" is not one. Cast two personas per review: one sympathetic, one skeptical. Both are honest; they differ in what they want and what stopping costs them (nothing, ever).

Every cast states four things before the read begins:

1. Priors: what they already know and believe about this topic, and what they have already read this week that this piece competes with.
2. Situation: where they meet the text (feed on a phone, inbox, a link a colleague sent, a docs search result) and what they were doing before.
3. Patience budget: how much they give the opening before bailing, from the empirical table below.
4. Stake: why they might care, in one sentence. If you cannot write this sentence, that is the first finding of the review.

Patience budgets (empirical, per encounter context)

Context	Budget for the opening	Source basis
Social feed scroll	10 to 15 seconds, roughly the first two lines	Chartbeat: ~55% of pageviews under 15s engaged time
Blog/newsletter via link	first screen, ~2 paragraphs	NN/g: at most ~20 to 28% of words read; commitment earned by the opening
Inbox (memo, cover letter)	under 30 seconds	recruiter/hiring-manager survey data; Ladders eye-tracking 7.4s initial resume scan
Slush pile / gatekeeper	first paragraph, one strike allowed	slush-reader practice: most rejections happen on page one
Investor / exec skim	~20 seconds per section, fixates on team/numbers/ask	DocSend: 3m44s average per deck
Docs / reference lookup	as long as scanning WORKS; zero tolerance for prose blocking the answer	information foraging: reader follows scent to the answer
Committed subscriber / fan	full read, but skimming the middle is still on the table	median scroll depth ~50% even for engaged visits

The two default casts

The sympathetic reader wants the piece to be good. They followed a recommendation, they like the topic, they read generously and finish unless actively pushed out. Their transcript shows what the piece is at its best (Elbow's believing game). If even this reader skims a section, that section is dead.

The skeptical gatekeeper is the genre's professional stopper: slush reader, staff engineer skimming a design doc, editor, investor, tired customer. They are looking for a reason to stop, one is enough, and an early credibility hit taxes everything after it. Their quit point is the review's sharpest number (the doubting game).

Adjust both to the piece's real audience. A skill README's skeptic is a developer deciding in 30 seconds whether to install; a personal essay's skeptic is a stranger who has read forty essays this week that open the same way.

Casting rules

• Personas must disagree with each other somewhere or the cast failed; rerun the skeptic with a tighter budget and a sharper stake.
• Never cast the author, and never cast "someone who loves this style".
• The persona's knowledge sets what needs explaining: an expert reader experiences a definition of basics as being talked down to; a newcomer experiences undefined jargon as a locked door. Both are needle events.
• If the user cannot say who the reader is, cast the skeptic from the venue (where will this be published?) and say in the report that the cast is a guess.