The writer's audience is not much of a fiction

In picking apart the ambiguity of the reader's role in The Writers's Audience Is Always a Fiction, Walter Ong is exultant of the merits of spoken-word communication. He is emphatic to the point that he almost sounds like Plato and other classic rhetors and his condemnation of written rhetoric, as though Ong would prefer arguments be committed to memory and performed. As Ong examines the role of the reader, he finds a great deal of complexities in the writer's relationship to their reading audience.

Ong finds the expectations of the reader to be too vague. He describes a student writing an essay: "Where does he find his "audience"? He has to make his readers up, fictionalize them." Ong goes on that the writer, ". . . might ask, "Who wants to know?" . . . The teacher? There is no conceivable setting in which he could imagine telling his teacher how he spent his summer vacation other than in writing this paper, so that writing for the teacher does not solve his problems but only restates them." (p.11) Ong is seeing a subtlety here in the reader's role that is much less of an issue in rhetoric than it seems. One does not need to fictionalize a teacher-as-reader; the teacher has a very clear role as the future reader of this essay. The student can very easily write in the voice of a student who is turning in this essay to a teacher, as other writers use the voice of an advertiser presenting a product or service, or a reporter writes in the voice of an informed individual writing to the populace of a community. The writer's audience is not that much of a fiction.


The phenomenon of writing and reading facilitates a dissemination of knowledge that is efficient enough to make up for what it loses in going from the spoken word to the written word. Readers act as pseudo-listeners, in that they imagine they are listening to a speaker's argument, but they know the argument is in fact written. It can be read at the reader's leisure, at the time that is convenient for the reader, and in the place the reader prefers. They do not have to conform to when the speaker has time to say their piece. The written word, furthermore, can be translated to other languages, and reach a wider audience, without need for the speaker to learn a new language. The rhetor does not lose much in transferring from the spoken word to the written word. Ong says on page 12, "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. . . . The transcribers of the Iliad and the Odyssey presumably imagined an audience of real listeners in attendance on an oral singer, and readers of those works to this day do well if they can imagine themselves hearing a singer of tales." An orator has to fictionalize their audience as much as a writer does. It doesn't seem that the role of the reader changed because of a transition from oral to written communication. Possibly the reader's role diversified, but did not become more fictional.

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (1975): 9-21. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/461344.