"Ong" To Something

Walter J. Ong’s, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” mentions to us some of the things we know, and some that we don’t, about that relationship between things that are written and those that are verbally said. Something interesting happens here when Ong takes it a step further and includes that group of people that are on the receiving end of the message. Some of you may know them as the audience. The target of the message and a key aspect in the cycle of communication. Without audience…who are you talking to?

THE DIFFERENCE: WRITER'S BLOCK

Ong then explains to us the difference between the audience of someone who is speaking and an audience of someone that is writing. Ong says that a writer has to fictionalize their audience because they are not going to be there when the writer puts “pen to pad” and the writer will not be present when those readers glue their eyes to the pages of what they just wrote. A reader can not hear or see how the writer presents the information so a writer is given the difficult task of using language to create an image. 

The Princess and The Frog: The Hidden Complacency Dilemma of Audience (Brought to You by The Magical World of Walt Disney)

A major discovery I took away from Walter Ong’s essay The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction is that many of his ideas point to a glaring truth: understanding readership and enforced roles can be used to explain complacency. Complacency even among the most informed and educated readers to accept ideas that when spewed by an ignorant person, those readers would object. Yet, when those same readers are presented with a familiar situion, a story, the readers are comfortable with doing what they as academics are supposed to do: analyze what the author is doing or what they are trying to do instead of thinking about how people may receive the writing and what enforced roles the work will continue to entrench in society. This can be done by understanding what Ong is interested in studying, what new discovers this frontier of readership study presents, and how using the case study of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog can show how these ideas manifest in real cultural examples.

Multiple Agents at Once: Ong Against Formalist's in Defining Audience

According to the Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, reader-response criticism emerged in the 1970s (425). This was very different from the traditional Formalist approach to literature studies that arose in the 1920s and 30s, which insisted that literary works had intrinsic value on their own as a text without outside factors such as the intention of the author, or the signification of the reader (189). Ong criticizes formalist thinking because "none...appear to broach directly the question of readers' roles called for by a written text"(Ong 9). The advent of reader-response criticism, for the first time, considered the role of the reader in literature studies as a way to understand literature and it's process of making meaning in the world. Some reader-response critics developed into reader-oriented critics which began to investigate reading communities as the most important aspent to literature studies. During the rise of reader-response criticism, in 1975, Ong considered the role of the reader in literature deeply in "The Writers Audience is Always a Fiction". However, in Ong's study of the writers audience (readers), he focuses a great amount on the writers role in texts based on an imagined, or created, audience by the writer. In this way, Ong utilizes ideas of reader-response criticism, but does not seem to completely support the idea that readership is the most important quality in literature studies due to his avid concern with the writer's dilemma and role in literature studies. Ong's focus on the writer and the reader supports the idea that there are more than one form of agent in literature, and readership is one of them.

Paralleled Power Over Audience

In this essay, Ong explores the concepts of the projected audience and the fictionalized audience while applying a reader-response criticism in the article. One of Ong’s most prominent arguments in the first half of the article is that the audience is further away in time and space for the writer compared to the orator, leaving the writer to fictionalize or project an earlier audience to write to or for rather than address. This implies that writers create roles for readers (in the plural sense rather than collective) in an attempt to control how the reader interprets their work. It also implies a power dynamic that the writer has to the audience. The writer must project or fictionalize readers’ roles due to the inability to speak to the audience in person. In reader-response criticism, the writer calls its audience to actively read and connect with the text. By demanding that role of the audience, Ong paves the way for diversity of readers’ responses (without requiring direct communication) the same way Ong and other rhetoricians have reacted to Plato and Aristotle, or students with teachers’ lectures. If this practice has been recycled throughout time despite evolving mediums or agents, then there must also be a distance between orators and their audiences.

Case Study: An Imagined Audience and Popular Film

In his essay, “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction”, Walter Ong argues exactly what the title suggests: When an author writes, he or she “fictionalizes” the audience for whom the work is meant.  Ong describes this situation in a more nuanced manner, saying that a writer does not write for an “audience” but only his or her readers (p. 10).  Essentially, a writer does not personally imagine each and every one of his or her readers when he or she writes.  The reasoning is well grounded when one thinks about the actual logistics of writing.  Ong uses the example of a student writing an essay for his teacher on how he spent his summer vacation.  When he actually writes the essay, there is no audience in front of him.  He gets no immediate reaction or feedback from his teacher.  In this case, the writer has no other choice but to imagine who he is writing for.

Fictionalizing Your Audience

In Ong's "The Writer's Audience is Always Fiction," Ong argues that the audiences of works of writing and speech vary significantly in immediacy, and that both audiences are fictionalized by the writer, as the writer is rarely directly in front of their audience when they are composing. The idea of audience becomes complicated for Ong because they are not in the presence of the author when they are writing and must therefore be imagined by the author and thrust into a certain role. Depending on how the author chooses to fictionalize their audience, the reader can be thrust into the position of an unknowing onlooker, of a friend of the narrator, or even placed directly into the shoes of the narrator. Because the audience is fictionalized and is not a part of the writing process, it is then up to the reader to choose to participate in the role that the author has created for them or to reject the role that has been assigned to them. Ong uses Hemingway's style of writing as an example, as Hemingway had a tendency to write his audience as someone that was already familiar with the setting and the characters in the stories, and therefore it was up to the reader to make sense of what is happening in the scene, rather than being spoon-fed the information by the author.

What's Wrong Ong?

The Complexities of a Fictional Audience

Ong’s The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction offers a keen analysis of the complex relationship between written and oral communication. He works to fully dissect the models by which they are most often represented and, in doing so, casts light on many facets of communication I had not known prior to the assignment.

“For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is further away in time space or both.” (pg. 10)

            This statement is common sense right? When I get on stage to perform, my content is tailored directly to the human beings under the sound of my voice – both in my vocal inflection and diction. As I am writing this response, I am bearing first in mind the grader and regard my classmates as a close second. Neither Dr. Graban nor my classmates are in my room as I type furiously away this morning, however, it is for their eyes that I desperately piece this together.

By this logic, I’ve constructed the formula:

Communication = time x sound

So, Communication may occur insofar as spoken words are heard and/or written words are seen.

How Imagining Being a Girl Can Change the World

Ong has a very interesting take on the ways that a rhetor should approach their audience - and that is by "constructing" it, or as in the title, imagining them as a fictional one. Early on within his essay, he differentiates how an orator and a writer have different kinds of challenges to address their audience successfully in order to effectively get their point across. In oratory rhetoric, an audience is singular, and based on certain notions said by the orator, the audience forms a collectivity that the orator can build from. Their audience is much more similar that the audience of a writer, likely being from a similar background since they are all gathered in a single spot to hear the orator's message. This aspect is absent from writing audiences, since each reader is receiving the information on an individual level. They could be from all kinds of different backgrounds and upbringings, so it is impossible for a writer to cater their message to each individual audience. So, this brings us to the critical discovery of the essay - that writers must efficiently "imagine" their audiences, or construct them, using the tone of their own voice and previous contexts. But this idea becomes complicated, as depending on how the writer chooses to display their own voice and tone, and who's voice they are trying to convey. For example, they must consider how the reader is reading their own voice; someone reading a Mark Twain novel, for example, will try to understand the work's voice, tone and purpose much differently than if they were to read a Donald Trump piece. Therefore, the writer must establish a certain level of credibility by creating their own, original voice and tone, so that the reader will absorb their writing's message in a way that they intended it to be.

Death of the Audience, or at least what you think the audience is.

Walter Ong’s, “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction” takes this commonplace idea of audience and breaks it down in a way that completely abandons our traditional ideas of it. Ong dissects the term in regards to its relationship to the delivery of a text, more specifically written and oral delivery. He begins with a criticism of current modern discussions of rhetoric by claiming they are typically only concerned with one method of delivery or the other, rather than the audience themselves.  He also notes the lack of discussion on the relationship between a speaker’s audience and a writer’s audience. In his essay Ong attempts to identify and break down the differences between an oratory audience and a writer’s audience. In fact he makes a point to explain that the term “audience” is inappropriate when describing a writer’s audience because they are not physically in front of he or she like a speaker’s audience is. It is because of this dilemma that Ong claims a writer must take a different approach to his readers then a speaker takes with their audience. A speaker audience includes intimacy and context that a writer’s audience could never have, and this affects ones reception of a text. Additionally there is a greater sense of “group dynamic” with a speaker’s audience, as they all share the same circumstances surrounding whatever text they’re receiving and this causes them to understand it relatively equally.

A Writers Audience is Always Fiction

In Ong’s essay, the topic of audience is discussed, and furthermore deciphered into two different types of audiences: a speaker’s audience and a writer’s audience. Ong states that these two audiences are thought of to be the same and even have the same term associated with them, yet are completely different and completely change the role of the orator and what he has to do to make his message/reading effective or memorable. Ong also discusses in this piece Hemmingway’s style of connecting with his audience with a “you-and-me” style, making the reader into a sort of friend, yet this could get confusing because Hemmingway would expect the reader to already know prior facts when placed in certain settings.

The Willing Immersion of the Fictional Audience

The essay by Walter J. Ong, “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” produces the theory of different audiences. There’s the dimension in which the author projects the audience for their work by assuming the audiences of related texts. The author expresses himself with an audience in mind. The second dimension of audience is the expectation that the audience is willing to be there. The readers allow themselves to be what the writer wants, but only if the text is already familiar to them. If they can already relate to the text prior to actually immersing themselves, they will be more inclined to actually be the audience.

            For readers to become a willing audience, they, in part, need to fictionalize themselves. They understand the story is about to be laid out for them and accept the fictional world. Ong talks about how the phrase “Once upon a time” for example immediately expresses how the story is fictional. The phrase is associated with children tales, establishing the fictional world. In Princess and the Frog, for example, the movie begins with the mother reading Tiana the story of kissing the frog into a prince. This is a story all to well known. And in the scene where she does kiss the frog, that story is again brought up, the frog showing how the story is supposed to go. Just showing the book in the film reminds readers to fictionalize themselves into the story.

Writers: Creating a Story for an Audience or Creating an Audience for a Story?

It’s always been interesting to me to imagine the world during the height of the oral tradition. I picture men and women of all ages, crowded around a fire or in the center of a village. They’d sit together and listen to a talented orator regale them with legends they’d heard time and time again. The speaker would add his own spin to these stories. Perhaps he’d allow a particularly tense moment to stretch out a bit longer, or pause for the laughter from a comedic bit to die down. He’d do everything he could to make that particular audience enjoy his stories, he’d make the story for them.

This is not how writing works. It’s early on in Ong’s essay when he points this simple yet essential distinction out: “More properly, a writer addresses readers-only, he does not quite "address" them either: writes to or for them. The orator has before him an audience which is a true audience, a collectivity” (11).  It’s here that Ong expands this initial thought with a crucial question: how does a writer make a story for an audience that they cannot interact with? The answer comes in the form of “fictionalizing the audience”. This concept essentially asserts that a writer must write for a specific intended audience, one that will both be interested in the subject matter and be able to put themselves in the idle headspace for understanding the work.  As Ong puts it, “A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life” (12).

Fictionalized Audiences and the Reader's Role

The writer needs only to point to what’s already there, for what the writer wants to tell you about is not the scene, but his feelings. The reader must learn how to be a member of an audience that does not “really” exist. Ong goes on to claim that a speaker’s audience is real and not as far away in space and time as it is for the writer. Despite this, orators also fictionalize their audiences to some degree. They must, just like writers, create or imply a role for their audience to play. While oral storytelling is a two-way street, writing normally calls for some kind withdrawal.

Writers naturally inspire others to play the role they are assigned by the writer. Sometimes, these roles are more forced than other times, such as when one is assigned a reading for work or school. The reader must assimilate to the role the writer makes for them. If the role is not one the reader wishes to play they don’t have to. Those that do choose to engage this way though, enter a “fictionalized” relationship with the writer, where the writer is encharged with guiding the reader into understanding, or, in other cases, entertainment. This trust between reader and writer is one that brings into question whether the reader is his own agent, and furthermore, to what degree the writer is his agent. The definition would suggest that as the reader engages with the writing, the writer is the agent, but if the reader steps away to do his own analysis, he separates himself and thus becomes his own agent.

"The Writers Audience is Always a Fiction" with Case Studies

After studying Walter J. Ong in many of my classes I find it interesting to know that before becoming a literature professor he was a Jesuit priest. He was very much used to hearing the word of God read out to him, as well as by reading the word himself. In his article “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction” he lays out some important frameworks about his main areas of focus as a literary philosopher on the transition of our culture moving from one that is oral to one that is predominantly literary.

 One of the frameworks given to us is that writers project audiences for their work by imagining the presumptive audiences of other pieces of writing, the best example I can think of that aids in the understanding of this framework is a fundraising statement. Most people when the fundraise for an event in current years will compose a text that almost always follows the same pattern. The current author did not just change the formatting of the given text because they thought of it by themselves, but instead will think of the times that they received a request for money and how it made them feel. That author will then compose their own while drawing off the work of the imagined audiences before them, and so on. This does not mean that every text created for fundraising will be identical, but it does mean that “each new role that readers are made to assume is related to previous rolls,” (12).

The Audience is Always Fiction and Reader Response

In “The Audience is Always Fiction,” Walter Ong theorizes on the role of the audience in oral and written verbalization. The implication of the audience was not initially studied in rhetoric. Gradually, a distinction between speech and writing in rhetoric was made by critics of the Formalist movement. Ong believed that the writer must imagine the audience for whom his text is intended for. Some of the strategies used in fictionalizing an audience work in congruent to the philosophies of reader-response criticism.

The first dimension of an audience that Ong discusses is the one where the author projects their audience by imagining their presumptive readers. There exists a tradition in fictionalizing audience that is a component part of the literary tradition. Ong states that the tradition is “correlative to the history of literary genres and literary works, and indeed the culture itself.” (p. 12) Of course, a writer does not envision every individual for whom their text is intended for, but they do cast an “ideal reader.” In the other dimension, the audience must be willingly fictionalized in the role that the writer has cast for them. Readers must conform themselves into the writer’s projections, which seldom coincides to real life. This literary game has been learned by readers over the ages.   

A Writer's Audience Is Always Fiction: A Case Study

In this essay Ong discusses the difference between oral and written word. These are two seemingly similar ways of conveying ideas to others but their functionalities and mechanisms actually prove to be quite different. With this in mind, the debate whether or not one method is more practical than the other, comes into question. After reading the thoughts of Ong, it seems as though the appropriateness of written versus spoken word seems to vary depending on context. One of the most vital components affecting the effectiveness of a text is its audience.

One very obvious but critical difference between spoken and written word, is the accessibility the author has to their audience. “For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer the audience is further away, in time or space or both” (10). Written word lacks the actual encounter between writer and receiver; there is distance between the two, providing a completely different experience. Because of this ‘space’ between writer and reader, Ohm suggests that more work must go into transcription to close this gap and ensure the intended message is understood. Without explicitly saying so, Ong discusses issues of agency in his essay. In circumstances where words can be exchanged orally, the ‘agent’ of delivery is what Ohm refers to as ‘circumambient actuality’ which I believe refers to present circumstances and the immediate translation from speaker to listener. Written texts lack this agent, the texts themselves and their medium are the major agents for transcending a message.

The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction

The entire objective(s) of  “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” can be understood by two key characteristics, including that the writer of the text must choose a role for the audience and that the audience must respond by fulfilling that role as they read, even if it does not reflect any part of their true reality. This means that with all published work, authors imagine who their desired or targeted audience is and hope that through this relationship, the audience will reciprocate that role and better understand it and the texts overall meaning through the perspective of the author or writer.

Another factor of reception for audience members involves the verbiage of an author’s written text, as this is key in how readers process the overall meaning and understanding. This can be better understood when Ong expands on Hemmingway’s “that” and “the” concepts. There is a vast gap between the understanding of work when recited orally or written, as written work is said to “neutralize time” and be able to “preserve information and conquer space by moving this information”, whereas, the audience is right in front of a speaker. Going off of that, another key factor to proper communication through written text includes immediacy and intimacy. These must both be established since the reader is distance and diverse. Additionally, oral narrators assist the underlying meaning of their story by their live interaction and behavior, allowing the audience to fictionalize themselves from this alone.

We the Fictionalized Audience: The Indirect Creators of Text

            "The Writer's Audience" by Walter J. Ong is an essay that truly pushes one to think about how one should delve into the task of addressing and invoking an audience. This wholeheartedly depends on goals and relevancy (to the author or to the times), as well as it does the author and his or her perspective.

            The audience is the group of people to which the content of an author’s text pertains. Authors cannot limit who reads his/her texts outside of the primarily targeted audience, but based on how he or she imagines said audience can determine what other (unintended) audience member come across and find relevancy within the text even slightly. For instance, a text may target a group of single-mothers, consisting of a wide range of stories. The title or perhaps one of the stories may have relevance to a mother who is, in fact, married, and because of the detail the author has incorporated into “fictionalizing” the cast of his audience, he has reached a wider range than initially aimed for (11, Ong).

Hemingway's Companion and a Poppin(s) Ad

In his essay entitled “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” Walter Ong asserts that as the rhetorical tradition began to shift from its prominence in oral form to its prominence in written form, the relationship between Author and audience would inevitably change as well. Because oral communication presents a scenario where the author has a direct relationship with his audience whereas written works not only are inherently more accessible to a larger audience, but often more distant from the writer themselves. “Because of inability to communicate orally, the writer's audience is always a fiction,” Ong declares as he goes on to assert that a writer’s audience must play the fictionalized role assigned to them by said writer if an effective conveying of text is to be achieved (17). While most of these claims are backed up by well thought out theories, they are all mostly proven under rather archaic types of technology and circulation methods. What fascinates me is whether on not Ong’s claims still hold merit in a contemporary context where authors are not solely reliant on text and voice, but modern extensions of that such as film and television.

Hemingway, Ong and The Girl

Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” provides a well thought-out theory on the role an audience plays in a writer’s work. Ong challenges the idea that there is a deep connection between a reader and writer, and claims that writers often have to create or “fictionalize” an audience when writing, that way writers have the ability to write about various situations and topics without being restrained by the certain needs of an audience. Ong’s theory is an interesting approach to the reader/writer dichotomy, but the point he brings up in his essay that fascinated me the most was Hemingway’s “you-and-me” style of writing.

Ong states that Hemingway’s style is often seen as “straightforward, unadorned, terse, lacking in qualifiers, close-lipped” (Pg. 13) because Hemingway has fictionalized an audience that knows him at the very least, as an acquaintance or friend. There is no need for a formal introduction in many of Hemingway’s novels, instead a reader is quickly submerged into the story. This because the reader has a presumed role of being a friend of Hemingway’s when he is writing. My question is, is this style of writing more affective or appealing to a reader? Or do books with some sort of formal introduction have a better appeal to a reader?

"The Girl Effect" and Walter Ong's "The Man" and "A Man"

After reading Ong's essay I had one thing that stuck out most to me and it was his discussion on Hemingway. I found the section when he is discussing "A man" and "The man" to be oddly intriguing. I say oddly because, before reading this essay I thought this concept was very simple. "This concept" meaning the universal understanding in terms of the language we use in America. Ong says on page 14, "Could readers of an earlier age have managed the Hemingway relationship, the you-and-me relationship, marked by tight-lipped empathy based on shared experience?".  This seems strange to me that he uses Hemingway's writing style as a land mark for a turn in audience. In that, I mean to say that before Hemingway showed the world this tight-lipped way of writing, the writer and reader didn't share a common understanding of things like "The man" or "The mountains". I find this hard to believe. He then goes on to explain it in a way that I didn't truly or fully grasp so I found his argument to fall through a bit. I just think that "The Audience" needs more credit than that, and Hemingway, in the grand scheme of literary writing isn't that old. I mean he died in 1961... Okay I've gotten a bit off track, but that portion relates to what I see in the case studies of "The Girl Effect".

The Key to Writing? Make Fiction Your Reality

When you picture an audience, several images come to mind; are you at a concert, a play, a speech? Are you listening to a song, reading a book, or watching a movie? Because the definition of audience can vary so widely, it is important to discern what exactly constitutes as an audience, and how this affects what information or media is delivered to that audience.

Ong differentiates between the types of rhetoric and how they have evolved over time. The original definition of rhetoric applied only to spoken word, and grew over time to also include written word, although many rhetoricians opposed this inclusion. Both of these versions of rhetoric include an audience. As Ong states, "For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both." (Ong 10). Ong then goes on to explain why the audience for a writer experiences many complications that a speaker will not have with his or her audience. When you are writing, there is no audience there for you to deliver your words, so you are meant to fictionalize this audience in your head, allowing you to imagine who you are trying to reach in your audience. The meaning of words that are spoken are meant to be apparent to the audience as they are being spoken, while written words usually require a higher form of understanding and context to truly grasp the concept the writer is trying to get across. This allows us to draw a comparison between Barthes's argument about authors and their work. Barthes would likely argue that rhetors who use written word are authors, while those who use spoken word are Authors. Authors have more of a set meaning for their words, while authors also need the reader of their work to understand it in their own terms.

The Power of the Girl and The Power of the Victim Role Assigned to the Audience

[T]he relationship of the so called "audience", to writing as such, to the situation that inscribed communication establishes and to the roles that readers as readers are consequently called on to play. (Ong 2)

Ong states how differently the process of understanding and delivery differ from speech to writing, the difference created also shapes the audience. Writing evolved through speech and the uses for such speech. When speech was the only way of sharing knowledge one did not need to fictionalize his or her audience, one could simply play off the audience's responses, and thus elaborate how he or she would expand or minimize content in the speech for the audiences entertainment. Ultimately all sharing of knowledge is for one person to give and another to receive, thus the delivery process and the receiving process of information changes drastically with how it is presented. Speech is a two-way street with unblocked channels, one orates and instantly sees the audiences reaction, one knows its audience due to their actions (laughing, frowning, etc), that enables a street in which one can give and receive simultaneously, this creates a space with less room for interpretation. While in writing we face the problem of being in a one-way road. The writer cannot see the audience's response and or see how to shape his or her content differently for the audiences enjoyment.

Audience and The Girl Effect

Ong writes that every reader of a text is being cast in a role by the author, and they typically respond by accepting that role and fictionalizing themselves to get the most out of the text. By imagining an audience and writing a text for that imagined audience, authors are able to influence the reader's perspective and embed the text with meaning.

Texts are unique methods of communication because they "preserv[e] the information and conquer space by moving the information to its recipient over distances that sound cannot traverse" (10). For Ong, this is important because it eliminates the need for the audience to be present. The immediacy and intimacy that comes naturally with oral communication is not immediately present when interacting with a written text, so authors have to find new ways to incorporate it in their work. They do this by fictionalizing the audience and in turn having the audience fictionalize themselves. Ong gives an example of this by discussing Hemingway's writing. Hemingway fictionalized his audiences in a way that is commonly seen today but was radically new for his time. By writing with definite articles, Hemingway fosters a sense of intimacy with his readers despite the distance separating them (spatial distance and distance over time, especially now that Hemingway is dead). Readers are cast in the role of close companion to Hemingway and embrace this role by accepting the information given to them without question; Ong showcases this by writing "'To the mountains.' What mountains? Do I have to tell you? Of course not." This intimacy makes it easier for readers to get lost in the story and is part of what makes Hemingway's writing so significant, even today. 

Fictionalized Audience in The Princess and the Frog

For Walter Ong, audience is a very complex and under researched concept. It carries different implications in both the oratory and written form concerning how the speaker both projects and fictionalizes their audience. This ability to project their possible audience ultimately gives the author an ability to influence the reception of their work. However, throughout his work Ong talks about factors that can complicate and influence and author’s ability to appeal to their audience. One idea that Ong highlights early on is the concept of cultural influence and context and how they factor into the role of an audience. In his essay he asserts that, “histories of the relationship between literature and culture have something to say about the status and behavior of readers” (p.2) This ultimately describes the power of the current social climate in a reader’s perception of the things they read. It’s displayed time and time again, when the changing cultural environment causes for books to be banned because the context in which they’re being read do not measure up to politically correct standards. He expounds on this idea of context in a quote by Maurice Merleau-Ponty where he points out that “words are never fully determined in their abstract signification but have meaning only with relation to man’s body and to it’s interaction with its surroundings..” (p.3) With these ideas in mind, and the way that they can hinder an author’s ability to connect with his audience he ultimately goes on to describe how an author can locate and construct a specific audience.

Fictionalizing Children as an Audience

Walter Ong writes that, when a student is presented with a generic prompt and asked to produce text or work, “The student is not talking. He is writing. No one is listening. There is no feedback. Where does he find his "audience"? He has to make his readers up, fictionalize them” (11). This reminds me of why Socrates prolifically prefered spoken as opposed to written rhetoric: the ability to argue back and forth on a point. The interaction of writer and reader here is so simple and seamless that it hardly needs explanation at all. However, when it comes to content that is viewed, read, or consumed without the ability of immediate interaction with the characters, writers, or the text or work in general, we must ponder on how we construct the audiences we create content for, and how we as audience members in an infinite amount of content interact with the creators of those entities.

Welcome to ENG 4020

Welcome to the course! Browse around at top and right to discover the various resources on this blog.

-Dr. Graban