Walter J. Ong’s essay “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction” examines the relationship of the audience to the writer, professing that because the audience is not in front of the writer, they are forced to imagine or make them up. Ong explains that writing for your fictionalized audience is stems from reading you have done by authors who have fictionalized their audience before you. The author can cast the audience in different types of roles, according to Ong. For instance, the Hemingway “you –and-me relationship” invoke great empathy in the reader based on shared experience, as if the reader had been through it with the writer, which was very different from the approach many writers before him had taken. Ong explains that even Homer established a fictional world with “once upon a time” language. Chaucer frames his stories and then made it seem real by placing himself, the narrator, in the tales. Ong goes so far as to assert that even letter writers are forced to fictionalize their audience because no one is physically there for you to address orally. Diary writers, too, do so because we do not normally talk to ourselves, and they must pretend they are not there in order to write to themselves. Thus, Ong argues that each writer must create a fictionalized audience when writing.
I think that when I was learning to write, I did fictionalize my audience, and still do, but without really thinking about it. Everything I write is done so for a certain intended reader that is not actually there. In Ong’s example of the student being instructed to write on the subject of “How I spent my summer vacation,” I found it very identifiable because I would write completely different essays for a different fictionalized audience. In fact, I have done exercises in writing classes where we wrote the same paper for different audiences and the result was completely different.
While Ong’s essay was much different from some of the other approaches we have studied, I believe that Ong makes a valid point that the audience is crucial to consider, and fictionalize, as the writer. It reminded me of Perl’s argument regarding the differences between skilled and unskilled writers. Perl pointed out that unskilled readers often take the readers understanding for granted. On the same note, Ong emphasizes that you must, as a writer, take into account your fictionalized audience. That is, the audience for whom you are writing. While Perl came to the conclusion that unskilled writers did not know how to effectively edit their work and attributed that to their lack of attention to their intended audience, Ong would likely argue that the fictionalized audience of the writer is based upon writings they have read in the past and the fictionalized audience of writers in the past. Therefore, I would conjecture that the more one reads, the better equipped they are to understand their fictionalized audience.
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