The writer’s audience is often fictionalized because readers are expected to make certain assumptions about what the author says. Vise versa, sometimes the writer has to assume that most readers know what he is talking about. The author may use words such as “the” or “that” and expect readers to know exactly what he is talking about, causing the readers to make assumptions up in their head. “The late summer of that year,” the reader begins. What year? The reader gathers that there is no need to say. “Across the river.” What river? The reader is apparently supposed to know. “And the plain.” What plain? “The plain”—remember? “To the mountains.” What mountains? Do I have to tell you? Of course not. The mountains—those mountains we know. We have somehow been there together. Who? You, my reader, and I. The reader—every reader—is being cast in the role of a close companion of the writer” (Ong 13).
The reader has to pretend that he has known or seen these things before. “A reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life” (Ong 12). The speaker or orator has an actual audience sitting before him; Ong call this a “true” audience. “Audience” is a collective noun. There is no such collective noun for readers, nor, so far as I am able to puzzle out, can there be. “Readers” is a plural. Readers do not form a collectivity, acting here and now on one another and on the speaker as members of an audience do” (Ong 11). Writers have to imagine or fictionalize that an audience is there. When someone orally speaks to an audience, they can physically see them and therefore are able to identify how they are feeling about what is being said or shown to them.
Hearing and reading information can be different in the way that people retain the information. For example, if you are reading something and run your eye over a certain word that involves a sound such as people talking, as a reader, you have to imagine the sounds of the people’s voices. In other words, you assume or fictionalize how their voices sound. “The contrast between hearing and reading (running the eye over signals that encode sound) can be caught if we imagine a speaker addressing an audience equipped with texts. At one point the speaker asks the members of the audience all to read silently a paragraph out of the text. The audience immediately fragments. It is no longer a unit. Each individual retires in to his own microcosm. When the readers look up again, the speaker has to gather them in to a collectivity once more” (Ong 11).
Aristotle is a good example of someone who writes and speaks for his readers and listners. “Aristotle’s logia were addressed to specific individuals whom he knew, rather than simply to the wide world. Even his more patently written compositions retain a personal orientation: his work on ethics is the Nicomachean Ethics, named for his son. This means that the reader of Aristotle, if he wants to understand his text, will do well to cast himself in the role of one of Aristotle’s actual listeners” (Ong 18). By Aristotle writing to specific individuals, he already knows who his audience is and does not need to imagine them. He can speak and write information that he knows will appeal to his audience because he already knows who the individuals are and how to persuade them.
Even for non specific audiences, Aristotle invented appeals he called ethos, pathos and logos. These three terms are his definitions of how people should speak and write to a particular audience. Aristotle thought the author of a text or speech was respected if people believed what he was saying or writing. This is where the ethos comes in. Ethos stands for the credibility of the author. When someone is speaking to an audience, Pathos comes in handy because of the emotional appeal. By an audience hearing someone and the tone of their voice, they can easily be convinced or persuaded of something. Logos is the last of the terms and has to do mostly with the logical aspect of speaking or writing. Aristotle states that you need to back up what you are saying or writing with logical claims and reasoning.
Essentially, whether you are a reader, writer, or speaker, there are different ways in which each of these individuals goes about giving information to their “audiences.” A reader must assume certain things about the writer and a listener to a speaker may also assume things by the orators tone of voice or even their body language.
-Dina Kratzer
Hi Dina,
ReplyDeleteI specifically liked that you related Ong’s theories back to Aristotle. The example of Artistotle writing for his son sheds light on the notion that he was specifically able to visualize the reader he was directing the text towards. Generally speaking, as Ong stated, an author has to envision and fictionalize his own audience, whether or not it comes to term with the true readers of his text. Most of the time, an author is not addressing a specific individual, so he is forced t base his expectations on past experiences in order to comprehend what his readers will perceive his text as.
It’s also interesting how you spoke about ethos. No matter what type of audience you may be writing for, it’s important to sustain credibility with your readers. As an author envisions his audience, he must maintain a relationship that allows readers to perceive the text as reliable. However, I agree with Ong in that it is important for an author to conceal any personal opinions throughout a text in order for readers to solely focus on the text itself, rather than the specific writer behind it.
While I feel that an author is crucial to a text, I also believe that there needs to be a fine line drawn, in which the words of a text do not relate back to the specific author himself. There can be no text without both reader and writer, but only through assuming the roles of each can a text be successfully comprehended. The fictionalization of each role is essential in the connection between the two. As writer writes for readers, readers read for author.
-Vanessa Coppola
Hello Miss Kratzer,
ReplyDeleteI found it really important that you had addressed Ong and Aristotle's ideas as being similar, especially the concept of ethos. Compelling the audience to believe you through ethos allows a story to be read, an article to be spread, and an idea to grow. Instilling emotions into an audience is a difficult but vital process to making an argument.
However, I would argue that logos would be the more important aspect to consider, and the one to carry ethos and pathos. Ethos is easily manipulated, as Ong explores in his example of the student writing about 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. The student comes to the conclusion that 'Tom Sawyer' has a similar writing style and bases his essay off of that instead of reading 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'.(Ong, 11)
Further, we should consider the difference between Ong and Aristotle as writer and speaker. As Ong himself said, 'For the speaker, the audience is in front of him. For the writer, the audience is simply further away, in time or space or both. (Ong, 10)' Besides comparing distances, Ong means to say that different techniques are needed for different forms of debate and rhetoric. An emotional appeal through ethos may not have the same punch written as it is spoken, especially when the way that the orator carries themselves is important to how their speech is processed by the audience, compared to how an author is asked to compose their argument, and may need more information (logos) to back them up.