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).

Ong classifies successful writing as writing that has this “fictionalized” audience in mind, and one could agree with this notion seeing that having a target in mind avoids the issue of being lost on what or who the text represents, and what perspective is being focused when having to figure out what extent things have to be explained to (depending on whether or not the targeted audience is well-read in what it is that the author is explaining) (Ong). As Ong moves on in the discussion, it is somewhat implied that “fictionalization” then causes a natural and clear set of other writing techniques and factors to fall into place, aligning with genre, genre conventions, and “culture”, for depending on how heavy the “fictionalization”, the more clear it could even become to the reader/other audience members that the author’s agenda and intentions are more specific, than not (12, Ong). He makes note of the fact that this imaginative process is, in fact, an age old process, emerging from the times of scribes and ancient storytellers, who had no audience present at the time of their artistic creation to guide their work (Ong). Ultimately, that is what “fictionalizing” the audience aspires to accomplish. It guides the writing of the author in a specific direction, and tells the author, quite literally, what to say initially, divulge later on, and emphasize as key points of text (what to focus on for memory as a textual element) based on what this cast of an audience knows, feels, resonates with, and, most importantly, understands. With that guidance as a foundation, every other textual element falls into place, and the tone, atmosphere, pace of the text, pace of plot development, intensity of language, and an array of other features are indirectly given a rubric or standard for the writer, solely going off his or her visualization of what the audience could be (with it in mind that those are the people, whom with which his or text will impact the most).

On page 15, the concept of the audience “fictionalizing” itself is addressed my Ong, which one could take to mean that the audience may have to try to work with the author and what he or she is presenting as perhaps the text caters mainly to the author’s understanding, thoughts, or beliefs that he or she wants to have resonate with a variety of people, even those who can sort of just grasp the preliminaries of the text, rather than solely a specified group. It is an important element to consider, because any individual who does place a heavy reliance on his or her “fictionalized” audience to come to life, must understand that the secondary and tertiary audiences will have to “fictionalize” themselves, in attempt to fit a mold that was not necessarily designed for them to try to fit in, though they are welcome, seeing that an author’s goal is to expand and spread his or her own ideas, rather than to confine them to those who already understand them and think in the way that he or she does.

Essentially, what Ong has presented, with most likely an audience of writers and creators in mind (his own "fictionalization"), that our rhetorical options as authors, must be consistent throughout the text in order to be coherent, and that specifying the “who” of a text gives the text strength in personality and depth, as the work becomes more specialized and associated with certain aspects of the world outside of itself. The author sounds more like he or she is more confident in discussing whatever the text is addressing when it is less vague, and characterizing the audience most definitely forces the author to think within smaller boundaries and consequently be less broad or loose with language. To evoke a response from the audience, one must know what it takes for that audience to be moved. To see an audience that is not there, one must reflect on what it is exactly that he or she is really trying to accomplish and establish as an author. “Fictionalizing” the audience incites both to occur in text; evoking a response and establishing clarity on perspectives and understandings. The most vital conviction of Ong’s discussion is that “fictionalizing” does not inorganically format writing into something that sounds cluttered and unstructured, but by default creates a framework for the author to work in, and successfully so, the more thought he or she places on this “ghost audience”.