Stedman opens the discussion by giving an analogy of sloppy writing and slow driving. He often gets an annoyed feeling in his chest like hot water filling a heavy bucket when he drives behind someone in the fast lane maintaining a low speed than what is recommended. Similarly, writers often forget that their readers are sometimes just as annoyed at writing that fails to follow conventions as drivers are when stuck behind a car that fails to move over, particularly in the fast lane.

The author argues that people are often unreasonable picky, and writers have to deal with such behaviors while composing a text. Good writers should always try to anticipate and preemptively fix whatever might annoy a broad range of readers. In other words, the more effectively you anticipate that pickiness, the more likely it is that readers will interpret quotations and paraphrases in the way you want them to accept and appreciate the work, depending on your writing context.

Writers should often remember that the conventions of writing have a fundamentally rhetoric nature. A fundamental obligation of a good writer is to follow different conventions depending on the purpose and audience targeted to read the text. For instance, in a blog, sources should be cited by hyperlinking them while in an academic essay, sources are cited through parenthetical citation. One major fundamental ideas of rhetoric are that writers shape whatever they want to write based on what they want it to do, where they are publishing it, and what they know about their audience.

In a nutshell, the author of this article elaborates the conventional ways of composing a text that does not frustrate the reader. Even though what is annoying could be varying from person to person, with some happily skimming past awkward introductions to quotations without a blink, understating the audience before composing a text can successfully help the writers to impress the readers.