Ong, Walter J. S. J. “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction”

Ong, Walter J. S. J. “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction”—55-76
“Over two millennia, rhetoric has been gradually extended to include writing more and more, until today, in highly technological cultures, this is its principal concern” (55).
On studies about reading. “But most of these studies, except perhaps literary criticism and linguistic studies, treat only perfunctorily, if at all, the roles imposed on the reader by a written or printed text not imposed by spoken utterance” (56).
“mock reader,” as does Henry James, whom Booth also cites, in his discussion of the way an author makes “his reader very much as he makes his character’2”(56) last para on page
Audiences whether for academia or for literary writers are imagined in the head of the writer.
“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” (57).
“Writing normally calls for some kind of withdrawl” (58).
Yes.
“More properly, a writer addresses readers—only, he does not quite “address” them either: he writes to or for them. The orator has before him an audience which is a true audience, a collectivity” (58).
“But ‘readership’ is not a collective noun. It is an abstraction in a way that ‘audience’ is not” (58).
“If the student kne4w what he was up against better than the teacher giving the assignment seemingly does, he might ask, ‘Who wants to know?’ (59).
If we could get a student to create his reader of someone who was passionate about whatever he was saying, someone who really wanted to know, would that make his writing better? Imagine an audience, a readership if you will, of only those who are intimately acquainted with the topic and who strive to learn every subtle nuance about the topic. I think that is something like what I do. How can I convey this audience representation to students?
“The subject [of a student’s writing] may be in-close; the use it is to be put to remains unfamiliar, strained, bizarre” (59).
On Jame Austen’s work, “The reader had to be reminded (and the narrator too) that the recipient of the story was indeed a reader—not a listener, not one of the crowd, but an individual isolated with a text” (69).
Readers do not become a “collective”. They remain individual and isolated AS THEY READ. The work of reading is isolated in the mind of the reader.
“Today the academic reader’s role is hardest to describe. Some of its complexities can be hinted at by attending to certain fictions which writers of learned articles and books generally observe and which have to do with reader status” (72).
Is this, in part, because each academic approaches the ‘learned article’ from a place which includes his own curiousity, his own knowledge, his own ability to synthesize the information, and ultimately his own reason for having chosen to read that ‘learned article’?
“No matter what pitch of frankness, directness, or authenticity he may strive for, the writer’s mask and the reader’s are less removable than those of the oral communicator and his hearer. For writing is itself an indirection. Direct communication by script is impossible. This makes writing not less but more interesting, although perhaps less noble than speech” (74).
Yes, to all of the above, with the exception of the ‘less noble’ aspect. Writers have more to contend with as far as audience is concerned. There is no automatic feedback, no subtle nuance of the voice he can use to insinuate meaning, no body language or facial expression which can be used to emphasize a point.