Saturday, December 3, 2011

Is a Written Audience a Constructed Audience?

Walter Ong (1982) argues that writing demands a constructed audience pointing to the work of  Maurice Merleau-Ponty who states in Phenomenology of Perception (1962) that words do not derive the fullness of their meaning and expression in the abstract, but rather reach their fullest expression and meaning in relation to the human body and its surroundings (pp. 181-184). So for Ong and Merleau-Ponty, the meaning in oral communication is present in the “now,” or the present context. Meaning is constitutive of and determined by all of the variables within the present communication environment. For Ong (1975, 1982), this “circumambient” context is not present in written discourse (p. 10), and therefore, written discourse demands a fictional or constructed audience to whom and for whom a writer “ projects” the piece of writing. It is the lack of verifiable context that makes writing, as Ong (1982) describes, a “more agonizing” activity than oral discourse (p.102).
As a teacher of writing and public speaking, I am confronted with the differences in projected audiences between the two communication genres.  In academic writing, present-day pedagogy focuses on the necessary construction of what Ong would call a fictional audience to aid the writer in being able to select, as Aaron, Kennedy and Kennedy (2009) state “ what approach to take, what evidence to gather, how to arrange ideas, [and] even what words to use" (p.35). As authors of a high-school composition textbook, Aaron, Kennedy and Kennedy (2009) advise high-school writers to “conceive of your audience generally—f or instance, your classmates, the readers of a particular newspaper, or members of the city council” (p.35). It is this aspect of the writing process—the conception of a general and not specific audience—that is the most difficult element to teach high school writers, and which is the most difficult for high school writers to grasp.  It is what gives high-school academic writing a disconnected quality.  There is often little heart in it. Public speaking, however, is as Beebe and Beebe (2006) state, an audience-centered activity (p.4). In other words, a public speaker has a clear audience in mind, a present audience of real, and not imagined people for the benefit of whom the presentation is being delivered. Because the audience is real, and present, and has something at stake in the hearing of the presentation, the discourse is more fluid, and perhaps more impactful.
References
Aaron, J. E., Kennedy, D.M., and Kennedy, X.J., The Bedford reader (2009 ed.). Boston, MA:
            Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Beebe, S. A., & Beebe, S. J. (2006). Public speaking: An audience-centered
            approach (2006 ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc. (Original work
            published 1991).
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New
     York, NY: Methuen.
Ong, W. J. (1975). The writer’s audience is always a fiction. PMLA, 90(1), 9-21.