"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.