Reading for Reflection: The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction by Walter J. Ong, S.J.
"Masks are inevitable in all human communication..." (Ong 74). I think that is such a great line. And it sums up a great deal of what Walter J. Ong is saying in this piece. Put simply, a writer's audience must step in to the role (or mask) that the writer has imagined them in.
I was mostly lost as to this point until I go to page 61 where Ong quotes Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway, he points out, uses one simple word that directs the reader: "that." Instead of saying, for example, what year it is or what town they are in ect. Hemingway says that or the indicating that the reader knows these details. Is there or has been their with the writer. It's so simple, and as a reader I've been doing it all my life. Just look at first person narratives; we step into the character's life, imagining ourselves as them. It never occurred to me to think of that as a connection to this idea of who is the "audience."
I'd have to agree with Ong in his opinions. I have always hated having to analyze my audience, because I don't know half the time who might wind up reading something, if anyone. The time that this is different is in email writing, and I think it's interesting that Ong brings up the fact that we have to assume the reader's mood upon receipt of the letter/email, and the reader then has to "put on the mood that you have fictionalized for him" (73).
With technology and blogs and all that is writing on the web, this issue is even further complicated. Because we really don't have any clue as to who our audience will be. We can only write to our imagined audience, or the people we'd hope to see reading. Or, for example, with facebook statuses we write with the fictionalized reader in mind of someone who cares about whatever it is we are saying.
Half the time, I think we just write to "hear ourselves talk." And we fictionalize an audience in the hope that someone out there actually does care.
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