"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. 

Another issue that I do not think was touched on enough was the difficulty in aiming for a specific audience. You really are not able to just limit or “build” you audience. You can say “this is a college level book” but that will not stop a high school or middle school student from picking it up because the cover is pretty and the title sounds interesting. Harder to visualize that audience.

THE DIFFERENCE: SPEAK YOUR MIND

With the audience of a speaker it is very different and easier to get a certain message across. As a speaker you can mold your audience and the people that receive your message much better. Example, movie directors. You want to target an audience you can look at stats, numbers and other data. You only want a certain age group to see it? Make the movie rated R. Sure a few sixteen or seventeen year olds will sneak by that one employee that doesn’t care by using a poorly made fake ID but you will be about 95% accurate in your aim. If I am a motivational speaker and want to talk to a college audience I just look for bookings at a college campus, it is much less of a headache. I can even feed off my audience and alter some of my content as I go if I am that good of a public speaker. In some cases the audience will take whatever you feed them because they love you that much (a presidential candidate).

All in all I don’t really think you can apply the term audience to a group of readers because they are all distant from one another as they read, so audience can only apply to those like-minded individuals that assemble in the same area to hear a specified message.