History reveals a time when primary orality was the predominant form of communication and/or education to a person, group, and community (an audience). A speaker can physically see his/her audience. Because of this, the speaker can know right away how to address the audience, and can change strategies on demand (Ong, 1982).
Conversely, writers do not have this audience vantage point privy to orators and both writers and readers are missing “extratextual context” (Ong, 1982 p.102). “Lack of verifiable context is what makes writing normally so much more agonizing an activity than oral presentation to a real audience… The writer must “set up a role in which absent and often unknown readers can cast themselves” (Ong, 1982, p.102).
Therefore, “The writer’s audience is always fiction” (Ong, 1982 p.102). (For the complete lecture on the quote used in Ong’s Orality and literacy click the quote above)
Ong basically explains that our audience is constructed by the writer. “Writers project audiences for their work by imagining the presumptive audiences of other pieces of writing[…] Readers seem willing to be fictionalized in this way—to be the audience projected by the writer—as long as the reader's role is familiar or the writer creates a new role persuasively. Thus, the writer's style or voice is a way of addressing an imagined audience that will respond in the desired way” (Ong, 1975).
What is an Audience?
As defined in Dictionary.com:
au·di·ence - Pronunciation [aw-dee-uh ns] –noun
1. The group of spectators at a public event; listeners or viewers collectively, as in attendance at a theater or concert: The audience was respectful of the speaker's opinion.
2. The persons reached by a book, radio or television broadcast, etc.; public: Some works of music have a wide and varied audience.
A Company’s Audience
Recently, I was writing website copy for the company I work for www.powderblueproductions.com . I emailed it to our vice president for approval. She asked me to rewrite it. I asked, “Why?” She said, “Because the verbiage and vocabulary is far advanced for our [audience]. Jazz it up with simple, energetic wording.” Due to my current reading and writing curricula for graduate school, I had lost sight of who I was writing too, my audience. I realize that we can’t just write something without thinking about who we want our audience to be.
A Politicians Audience
In other cases, people are aware of the audience they are constructing when writing speeches are political text. In fact many politicians hire a team of people to assist them in this area of their campaings. However, even a speaker or reader may miss-interpret what they hear or read. Please watch the following video. Watch the expressions of people standing behind him as well as his own. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT0OE0tuA1A Later on John Kerry does explain that he was tired after long hours on the campaign trail and he indeed “read the joke wrong.” I wonder if the person who wrote that joke was looking for a new job the following day?
Live Audience Vs. Fictional Audience
Although orality exists today, technology allows additional platforms for people to communicate ideas, stories, educate, inform and more. Vibing with Ong, writing along with all technologies restructure conciseness over time developing, primary orality into a form of secondary orality. As a result this changed and continues to change the way we speak and/or the construct of our prose.
“I style the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print, 'primary orality'. It is 'primary' by contrast with the 'secondary orality' of present-day high technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print. Today primary culture in the strict sense hardly exists, since every culture knows of writing and has some experience of its effects. Still, to varying degrees many cultures and sub-cultures, even in a high-technology ambiance, preserve much of the mind-set of primary orality” (Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy, p. 11).
Conclusion:
Finally, there are two points writers should recognize when constructing our audience:
1. Our period’s growth of technology and communication tools has increased the scope of our ‘audience’.
2. It is important to recognize that as we ‘construct an audience’ that over time that audience (even though they are fiction) will continue to change.
References
Audience. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved October 10, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/audience
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing the Word. New York: Methuen
Ong, W. J. (1975). The writer’s audience is always a fiction. PMLA, 90, 9-21.
Ong, W.J. (1974), The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction. Fourteen page typescript from one of Ong's Lincoln Lecture tour lectures. Retrieved October 10, 2008 from the Walter J. Ong digital collection at Saint Louis University http://libraries.slu.edu/sc/ong/digital/texts/lincoln/lincoln04_en.pdf
Additional Sites Viewed:
http://www.birminghampost.net/life-leisure-birmingham-guide/postfeatures/2008/09/19/celebrating-birmingham-s-literary-heritage-65233-21856801/
http://www.google.com/search?sa=N&tab=nw&q=who%20dictates%20a%20constructed%20audience (who)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=what+dictates+a+constructed+audience (What dictates news)
http://tlu.ecom.unimelb.edu.au/pdfs/essaywritingattitude.pdf
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/bljohnkerryjokes.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=CeWuv8B_ERkC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA37&dq=writing+demands+a+constructed+audience&source=web&ots=csGD97KIp6&sig=lzQfsmEpu8EaRJP6IJl3qLX4kZI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result http://books.google.com/books?id=pLcSIGgWB14C&pg=PA108&lpg=PA108&dq=who+dictates+a+constructed+audience&source=web&ots=8b5oWMxUMW&sig=PjkNmqHrgZToBgSWWa7L3c28N-I&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result
