Creating an Audience

In his influential essay “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction,” Walter Ong argues that audiences casts themselves in fictional roles while reading. In Ong’s words, “An office worker on a bus reading a novel of Thomas Hardy is listening to a voice which is not that of any real person in the real setting around him. He is playing the role demanded of him by this person speaking in a quite special way from the book, which is not the subway and is not quite ‘Wessex’ either, though it speaks of Wessex” (12). If we are to look closely at Ong’s claim here, isn’t much of what he calls role playing in fact genre interpreting? In many cases[6], the audience does fictionalize itself, but the guidelines by which it establishes the borders of its adopted role are governed by genre. There are certain themes that an audience expects to encounter when reading a Thomas Hardy novel—anguish, longing, a sense of being trapped by convention—and far from contradicting those expectations, the voice that the office worker hears constitutes those themes, reinforcing the “appropriate” role and giving it credence. In other words, the role in which the audience casts itself isn’t arbitrary. Ong claims that the readers are conforming themselves to the “projections of the writers they read[7],” but does the author’s name have that much of an impact on the reading, or is Ong attributing to writers what is actually genre? Even if we were to completely remove the author’s name from a text, the form would still remain. And as Miller claims, “Form (genre) shapes the response of the reader or listener to substance by providing instruction, so to speak, about how to perceive and interpret; this guidance disposes the audience to anticipate, to be gratified, to respond in a certain way (in a certain role)” (159).

[6]I don’t feel Ong’s assertion that the audience must fictionalize itself holds up in every circumstance. In his Hemmingway example (12-13), where the author has consciously included the reader as an interacting character in the story, there certainly is an element of role playing on the reader’s part. However, Ong doesn’t take into consideration the myriad stories that leave the reader as a spectator to the action. In that situation, the office worker reading a novel on the bus is simply a bystander, viewing from a safe distance the events taking place. Unless the author chooses to break that wall between text and audience by conspiring with the audience as Hemmingway did, there is no transfiguration of the office worker into an active character. His role in life may not resemble the fiction he’s reading, and much like watching the local news on television, we don’t usually transpose our real life with the glamorized violence and entertainment news we’re watching.

[7]Ong is probably responding to Foucault’s author-function when asserting that the writer determines the role in which the audience plays. But as Bawarshi points out, author-function only recognizes a small portion of all discourses—“privileged” texts.

Because genre is so pivotal for role casting, and titles and genre are inherently tied together, titles can be viewed as the foundation that a fictionalized audience is built off of. The title is the first indicator of the role that an audience is supposed to play. An obvious Fantasy title, Dragon Lance for instance, is going to create very different expectations and roles than a Romance title, Lover’s Rendezvous. But more to the point, we need to express to our first-year composition students that their titles can be useful tools for inducing certain responses in their audience. For example, an essay about photography techniques titled Painting with Light—which will cast the audience in the role of art enthusiast—will have a very different affect on the audience if the same essay is titled How to Compose an Artistic Photo—which calls for a more sterile, systematic reader. The latter example is going to reproduce the conventions that the audience used to read every other “How To” manual they’ve come across, and since “we perform an activity in terms of how we recognize it—that is, how we identify and come to know it”—the audience will, without realizing it, view the current essay through those terms[8](Bawarshi, 339). When a student chooses a genre (such as academic essay, editorial letter, narrative, proposal, etc.) and/or a title that reflects a specific genre, they need to take into account the fact that the audience they create will be based on the guidelines of the genre, whether that’s their desired result or not. Since titles are the first indicators of a genre, students can’t ignore or marginalize the title’s impact on their audience.

[8]This brings to mind Burke’s idea of a terministic screen—that we come to a text with certain terminology, and what we take from the text is based on our terminology. An interesting project would be to look at how genre works in conjunction (since each genre incorporates its own intrinsic set of term) with terministic screens (Bizzel and Herzberg).

Creating a Writer

Talking with my own students on a one-to-one basis, and actually, thinking back to my own days as a student in first-year composition, it seems to me that writer’s block is an especially pernicious problem among first-year writers. Every composition teacher has been approached by that student having difficulty getting their essay started. Even when they know what direction they want the argument to go, the words don’t always form themselves into acceptable sentences, and the student spends much of their time writing and rewriting the same idea or staring at a blank page while they wait for inspiration to strike. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that first-year writing, the site of this writer’s block, is often the first place where a young writer takes the time to consider their audience. According to composition scholar Peter Elbow in his interestingly titled essay “Closing My Eyes as I Speak[9],” “An audience is a field of force. The closer we come—the more we think about these readers—the stronger the pull they exert on the contents of our minds. The practical question, then, is always whether a particular audience functions as a helpful field of force or one that confuses or inhibits us” (94). Whether the audience is a group outside the university, their peers, or the professor (who is always present in the student’s consciousness because of the professor’s inescapable position of authority), the desire to impress the audience is relentless in its sway over the young writer. For some composition students, the pressure to write academically is immobilizing.

[9]Consider the implications of an academic article so informally titled. Why did Elbow feel it necessary to include the subtitle “An Argument for Ignoring Audience”?

Elbow claims that when faced with an inhibiting audience, the writer should ignore audience altogether. But ignoring audience at any stage in first-year composition, especially when that audience is determining the student’s grade in the course, isn’t as easy as flipping a switch. Although Elbow’s suggestion sounds rational, it may not be practical. There is, however, another possibility that could achieve the same results. Through genre, we know that we can endow our audience with certain expectations. At the same time, by changing what the audience expects from a text, we also change the expectations that the writer must achieve. Take, for example, the kinds of titles commonly seen in our scholarly English journals. “The Phenomenology of Error[10].” “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class[11].” “Intellectual Property and Composition Studies[12].” “Teaching the Political Conflicts: A Rhetorical Schema[13].” The ethos we hope to achieve as scholars is reflected in the titles we attach to our work. If we were to change the title of “Phenomenology of Error,” for instance, to something more pedestrian, such as “Fun with Grammar,” or something more youthful, such as “Why You Hatin on Errors?,” the initial expectations that are attached to genre are also changed. I’m certainly not suggesting that there be a revolution in how we title scholarly articles, but for a first-year writer, a title that releases them from scholarly expectations may be just as freeing as ignoring audience altogether.

[10]Williams, Joseph.

[11]Berlin, James. College English, Vol. 50, No. 5 (Sep., 1988), 477-494.

[12]Lunsford, Andrea and Susan West. College Composition and Communication. Vol. 47. No. 3 (Oct 1996), 383-396.

[13]Lazere, Donald. College Composition and Communication. Vol. 43. No. 2 (May 1992), 194-213.

What may be even more interesting is how a title and its corresponding genre can be used to channel the direction of a student’s essay, casting not only the audience but the writer as well in a role. The title of this essay, “The Mysterious Incident of the Missing Title,” works to exemplify this point. Its informal, almost playful nature influences such examples as “Why You Hatin on Errors?,” an example that I never would have conceived had I set more pragmatic expectations with a title like, “Titular Dynamics and the Phenomenology of Genre[14].” The tone we set at the beginning of a work has the tendency to carry the writer through to the end. In that way, a title will not only direct how a work is read but also how it is written. If we want our students to leave First-Year composition writing as scholars, then teach them how to title like scholars. If, on the other hand, we want our students to find their voice, teach them the impact that a title has on them and the reader and encourage them to experiment.

[13]At the same time, the subtitle (which is still fairly informal), “Why did titular concern vanish from composition studies?,” situates the argument within the genre of scholarly essays and constitutes its voice within academia.

As we teach argumentation to our first-year students, it’s important that we don’t get so wrapped up in teaching structure and style that we forget about how fundamental form and genre are to our understanding as writers and readers. As the first indication of genre and the first thing our audience is going to read, a title can establish the tone and expectations that will guide a text from beginning to end. It’s important, too, to recognize that titles are more than just a name; they are rhetorical tools to be used. The right title has the power to create an audience, unblock writer’s block, and influence the direction of the author. That much power should not be ignored.

Works Cited:

Bawarshi, Anis. “The Genre Function.” College English. Urbana: January 2000. Vol. 62, Iss. 3; 335-51.

Berlin, James. College English, Vol. 50, No. 5 (Sep., 1988), 477-494.

Bizzel, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, Eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.

Bullock, Richard. The Norton Field Guide to Writing. United States: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.

Elbow, Peter. “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” College English, vol. 49, no. 1, 1987, pp. 50–69. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/377789.

Lunsford, Andrea and Susan West. College Composition and Communication. Vol. 47. No. 3 (Oct 1996), 383-396.

Lundsford, Andrea, John J. Ruszkiewicz, and Keith Walters. Everything’s an Argument, 7th edition. United States: Bedford/St. Martin, 2016.

Lazere, Donald. College Composition and Communication. Vol. 43. No. 2 (May 1992), 194-213.

McWhorter, Kathleen T. Successful College Writing, 6th edition. United States, Bedford/St. Martin, 2015.

Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech. May 1984. Vol. 70, 151-167.

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA, vol. 90, no. 1, 1975, pp. 9–21. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/461344.

Sedaris, David. Naked. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.

Williams, Joseph M. “The Phenomenology of Error.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 32, No. 2, May 1981, pp. 152-168.