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.

Ong brought up an interesting point in this article that I have never really thought of before: are readers an audience? Ong believes that readers are not a part of an audience due to the fact that when one reads something it is to himself, in his mind with his own thoughts and imaginations about the event. Furthermore, the word “audience” translate to a collection of people, and a collection of people do not read, they do it privately even if they are all next to each other. I find this to be nearly entirely accurate, as when we read a story, the voices, faces, personalities, and even attitudes of the characters all differ in each of our minds. There could be similarities amongst our assumptions but overall, each and every one of us have our own ideas of what a text is after we read it, where on the other hand when we watch a show or movie everyone in the room that has working eyes all see the same images on the screen, putting the entire audience in the same boat.

As someone who has been a sports writer for the past couple of years and an avid fan of writing throughout my life, I constantly find myself putting myself into fictional settings and scenarios anytime I write something, whether it is an article recapping a game or a story about a Latino American baseball player escaping his home country for a better life in the U.S. Yet placing myself into a certain setting is not the issue I constantly run into while writing; it’s who is my audience, and how much does my audience know? For example, if I am recapping a game, most of my audience most likely did not see the game, otherwise they probably would not be reading my article about what happened with the game. Yet, when I describe what happened in the game it is nearly impossible at times to strike a balance between explaining what happened but not spending a full paragraph on it. A way to get past this is to just clip the highlights of the game into my article between paragraphs, making it an easy pain-free read. However, I feel as if it takes away from the writing portion of my article at that point, and why I’m even writing an article. There are just certain events that occur that cannot be made better or enhanced by simply spoken word: audiences in 2018 love visuals.

This is why the scene in the Princess and the Frog was made for screen, as if you were to read this scene in a novel you would not get the same effect of seeing the frog’s lips pucker up, or seeing the pure fear in the princesses’ eyes when she was attempting to kiss him. It is especially difficult with animals, as it would be extremely difficult to imagine an animated frog without seeing one beforehand. I would be hard pressed to imagine anything other than a princess kissing a real life, slimy actual frog, yet with the animation that was used it made it into a cartoon style, easy-to-view scene, yet a writer’s audience could never have experienced this.