The Evolving Audience: Alternatives to Audience Accommodation

While such literary theorists as Wolfgang Iser and Louise Rosenblatt have been demonstrating the many ways readers actively construct the meanings of a written text, teachers of writing have become increasingly interested in what may be a corresponding process: the ways writers actively construct their audiences. Composing scholars and rhetoricians have begun to question the traditional emphasis on adapting a text to a predetermined audience. The process of imagining a reader, says George Dillon in Constructing Texts, is not an attempt to approximate the knowledge and viewpoint of actual persons but a process of projecting a self that readers will try on and find agreeable (163-64). In Writing for Readers, Barry Kroll cites the seminal articlesWalter Ong's The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction and Douglas Park's The Meanings of 'Audience' -and sums up the new view of audience in this way: