In Ong's "The writer's audience is always a fiction", Ong suggests that a key component in the writing process is imagining who your audience is when writing your paper. He says that writers are blind to the reaction of the audience therefore you need to create a fictionalized audience to write to. He gives an example of a public speaker speaking to an audience and how that speaker can manipulate the direction he wants to go in his speech based on the reaction he is receiving from the crowd. Ong says that this communication process does not exist in writing. You are not immediately receiving feedback from your audience because they are not present when you are writing it. He believes the best way to help alleviate the problem is by creating a fictionalized audience to write to help create a better communication pathway. The article suggests that the more you read and understand other authors fictionalized audience the more suited or successful you will become in understanding your fictitious audience.
Although I agree with Ong's view on how writers need to visualize the audience they are writing to, I feel a writer should never write something just to please his audience. A writer should go in the direction he wants to go but still maintain a level of relevance to the audience of the paper. In this article, Ong says that if he is hopeful that tens of thousands of people will read his book, but how can he possibly be writing to an audience that large? A good writer, like Hemingway, shapes his audience to feel the emotion he wants to feel or favor a character he wants the audience to favor, but he does it through sharing like experiences with the audience.
In my style of writing, I usually do not think about who will be reading the paper. I write what sounds good to me. I guess this means if what I write sounds good in my mind, then it must sound good in the readers mind. The concept is very presumptuous I realize, but after reading Ong's article and understanding the importance of writing to an audience, it will give me something I can work on for my next papers.
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Jake, I thought you had a good summary, but what I especially liked was your opinion that writers should not write just to please their audience. I agree with you that the way Hemingway visualizes his audience is more meaningful and perhaps helpful than thinking of thousands of possible readers.
When you said , "I write what sounds good to me. I guess this means if what I write sounds good in my mind, then it must sound good in the readers mind" I think you have a point. Since you are a somewhat experienced writer, it is not too presumptial to think someone like you will be reading your paper.
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