Just finished teaching and reluctantly forced myself to open up a paper i'm slightly late in reviewing (because, pandemic) -- but got immediately drawn in by the excellent introduction! Now excited to spend my day on this. this is the thing an introduction has to accomplish.

i feel that you can really tell when a paper is written for you -- the reader -- versus being written for the author's own joy or whatever. if you want to communicat effectively, you have to think about your interlocutor! "what's my reader thinking now? what's she feeling now?"

and you have to take her seriously because you can't force her to read your paper -- you have to convince her to keep reading. all writing intended for an audience has a persuasive element to it. your reader can easily just put you down if she wants!

as a writer you are always at the mercy of the reader -- even if you are a bigshot who can effectively use your institutional power to force people to do things, if you fail to really convince people of the things' merit, once you're dead they won't do them anymore

Also, asking people to read your paper is a BIG ask. papers are long and complicated; math is hard, concepts are hard. time is so precious, focused attention so limited. evey sentence has to earn the right to your reader's precious time and energy.

To me this is why doing the research - which I do almost entirely guided by my own interest, desire for edification, and sense of what's truly important - is a *really* different headspace to writing up and communicating the research, which is never about me and always about you

you have to cycle back and forth between these two mindsets in order to end up with a project that you, personally, will be able to effectively complete and communicate to other people, but it's really worth it imo.