In the article, "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction" by Walter J. Ong he depicts the differences between a writer's audience and a speaker's audience. The major difference is that the speaker's audience can give the speaker immediate feedback and he generally knows the persons that will be present. A writer's concept of an audience is a bit more complicated because they have to create one in their minds because they do not know who will be reading their piece of work. " He has to write a book that real persons will buy and read" (pg. 58) and that can be a challenging task.
The job of the author is to create an imaginary audience in his mind and give them a role to play in their story. So that the audience can fictionalize themselves in the novel, as the writer did when he was creating it. An example of how an author may do that was expressed by showing Hemmingway's tactics. He commands the audience attention and sets the scene as if the reader has seen and/or experienced the same thing the character in the story is. Hemmingway creates a bond between the reader and the main character, camaraderie , he boost his reader self esteem and interest in the novel by doing this. The reader in a way becomes actively involved in the story.
The tactic of having the reader be a participant in the story is something that has been used by authors for years. One phrase that everyone knows is "Once upon a time" which boosts readers imagination and takes them out of reality. Also, some authors create various characters in their novels that could relate to a variety of people. this engages the reader because they now have someone they can relate to. This tactic was especially helpful for me when I was in the primary grades learning how to deal with peer pressure, new experiences that come with maturity and other issues of that form.
The one form of audience that most would think are easy to create are the ones that are the most challenging. To create an audience for a diary or a journal is a complicating task due to the fact that the writer is supposed to act like they are not fully there because of the fact that they are trying to tell 'someone else' about their thoughts and issues going on in their life. That is when a "mask" may be useful. This writing technique is used for the author to be completely honest by masking other emotions they may be feeling. For writing a letter it is hard to depict how to write the greeting because you do not know the mood your reader will be in that day, so the writer needs to create one for the reader.
1 comment:
I love your post. I don't know--it just shows that you had, or still have, the ability to "be written" by the things oyu read, as in how you mentioned your socio-emotional difficulties in primary school were addressed by things oyu were reading; you were effectively cast into the role the author wrote for you--or more interstingly, you may have not cast yourself into the role the AUTHOR was imagining, but a role into which your mind cast itself based on all the available cognates, images, experiences, and dreams you stored up so far at that age.
I am increasingly believing that it really has nothing to do with that the author "put into" her work, but has everything to do with what readers "read into" the work--meaning, as we read, our own minds write. It is that mental-writing, not the original reading, that creates meaning and interpretaitons.
Thank you for the thorough response. I look forward to the rest!
As for me, I have been playing the game as "scholar" whenever I read things too difficult to understand. If I play the game, I can more easily and quickly become one, and understand everything I read. Transferring here from Triton College, and before that, having attained GED because I dropped out of High School, I found myself in a world so intriguing and interesting to me, but linguistically unavailable (I mean, not really. I was already an avid reader-- it was not so "POOF!" --cut and dry as I make it seem; but anyway, for effect...) The world I wanted to become a part of was blocked off with walls of concepts and philisophical assumptions I had never been acquainted with. But I handled it because I played the game; the more I pretended to understand, the quicker I was actually able to understand and start generating my own theories about writing (and stuff like that).
Anyway, cradizzle!!!
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