What’s the us(ag)e?

 15. The writer and the audience: dancing with a ghost

But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years; and with what facility, by the different arrangements of twenty characters upon a page!

There is an illustration from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, a great source book for teachers of writing as he is a master of visual media, that portrays the “ghost dance” a writer makes with the reader. To me, this is a near-perfect image of the act of writing. The writer is real; the dance is real. The other, the audience, however, is not; it’s an image constructed of language.

Before I explain the nature of this ghost dance, I want to examine different types of writing, examine them in terms of the audience. Already I am expecting some resistance, especially from teachers of writing, since I have stated above that the audience is a ghost, and I have just stated that I want to look at types of writing as determined by the audience. Are there different types of ghosts? Probably, but I’m asking for some indulgence here, at least a brief pause before any storm of protest.

            Let’s take the simplest form of writing, a note reminding you to buy some apples the next time you go to the grocery store. What goes on the note? You don’t write out a complete sentence. You write “apples” or maybe only “Ap.” Why don’t you write out a complete sentence like this one, recognizing yourself as the reader?

            Remember to pick up some apples when you go to the grocery store.

You don’t need to. And you don’t write this. Addressing yourself as the writer:

            I must remember to pick up some apples when I go to the grocery store.

You don’t need to and don’t want to. Why? Because you are the writer, and you are the audience. There is no need to write more since the context that makes understanding possible is shared between writer and audience since you are both. You can be as cryptic as you want. You could write in Morse Code, or any other code, if you wanted to. You have no obligation to an audience other than that you understand yourself. There is no need for any highly structured writing. And for this type of writing, the audience is not a ghost. Or is it?

Why are you writing this note? You are using writing as a form of permanent memory. You are writing in order not to forget to get those apples. You are writing to yourself, but you are also writing to your self who is not there yet.  Yours is the self who will be there when you are ready to go to the grocery store. So in this sense, you are writing for a ghost.

What about another type of writing where you are also the audience? What about a diary? Here, too, you are both writer and audience. One significant difference between a note and a diary is that the audience for a note is yourself and anyone else who cares to read it (and since it is cryptic, it matters little if anyone does read it). A diary, however, is private. You are the writer and the only audience. Is that audience also a ghost? For much the same reason that the audience for your note is “ghostly,” the audience for your diary is too. You are writing in order not to forget, to have your writing remembered by you at some later time. The self that you are writing for is not exactly the same as the self who wrote the diary entries. Time passes; you are different. At the time of the writing, you are not the audience; your future self is the audience. Call it what you will, but that self, too, is ghostly.

Let’s look at the more common types of publish writing, ones where the writer and the audience are not the same person. How about letters? Writing a letter to oneself is almost like speaking out loud to oneself. There are occasions when we might do it, but if it were frequent it might be a sign of mental instability. Suppose we write a letter to a friend, a close friend. Since this person knows us well, we can be almost as cryptic as we are when we write notes to ourselves. Almost. We must establish the audience by addressing the person: “John,” “Dear John,” “Hey buddy!” whatever works. Other than this formality, we can write just about any way that we want to. And the reason for this freedom is that we share with our friends so much of the context that makes understanding possible that we can take use language that otherwise would be incomprehensible to others who don’t know us or don’t know us very well.

We take shortcuts with our friends because we know we both will arrive quickly at the same place. What kinds of shortcuts? A name will stand for a whole story. We write that Uncle Dan will arrive next week for a visit. We don’t have to explain who this guy is, what he looks like, how he acts, what he usually says, or anything else that we would have to explain to a stranger. We don’t worry about spelling and grammar. Our friends don’t care. They don’t judge us. They might even be offended if we paid too much attention to making our letter perfect since such perfection would be too formal and suggest a coldness, a stiffness in the relationship.

            Is this audience a ghost? To only some degree. This friend is not with you when you write; if so, you would not write. You would talk. You assume that the person is still alive, otherwise why write? So your friend is a ghost only in that at the moment you write the letter, he or she does not exist in the same place where you are writing.

Another type of writing: letter to strangers. This kind of letter is qualitatively different from a letter to a friend. Because the audience does not share much of the context that makes understanding possible, it is necessary for your writing to be very structured, relying on pre-determined forms that the reader anticipates. The audience for your letter is a ghost just like for a letter to a friend, but this ghost knows almost nothing about you except for what you supply in the letter.  Your letter must be self-contained, meaning that you must offer to the reader all of the information needed to get across to the reader all of the meaning you need to get across. You can’t take shortcuts. And to ensure that the reader follows you to your destination, you direct the reader to follow established routes. Your letter has a standard introduction, paragraphs that supply all of the details you wish to explain, and a conclusion that the reader expects to signal the end of the letter.

Although there are many other types of writing (signs, greeting cards, reports, poetry, novels, lists, advertisements, e-mail, etc.), I want to get to the final object of this lesson—student essays.

Types of writing based on audience, with implications for how the writing is structured:

Notes: audience = you (ghost self) / no structure

Diary: audience = you (ghost self) / almost no structure

Letter to friends: audience = someone who knows you well

(audience does not exist in the place where you write) /

very little structure

Letter to a stranger: audience = someone who does not know you /

much structure

Essay: audience = someone who does not exist in the space or the time

of the writing, a “real” ghost / very much structure essential for meaning

Given the characteristics of this audience, you can easily see why it is so difficult for students to write good essays. First of all, the audience does not exist either in place or time. That’s the most important characteristic, but it’s the characteristic that students have little understanding of how to make this fact work for them instead of against them. Students express their lack of understanding of the writing process by asking what the teacher wants. They assume (with some justification, given how writing is taught) that the teacher is the audience for their writing. Instead of asking what the teacher wants, however, the student should be asking, “What works?” And what works is a dependable, predictable, structure.

Unlike speech, writing is a one-way communication. The writer makes words and sentences onto paper or computer screens. Speaking always implies an audience, and an audience always returns a message in response to speech. When I speak to a class, the student who is yawning or asleep is sending me a message as strong and clear as the one who seems eager and is taking notes. These return messages make it possible for me to modify the message, dispel confusion, keep the speaking continuing until satisfaction is attained by the audience. But there is no return message to writing.

            Writing must anticipate the questions that the audience might ask. Writing seeks to be self-contained, establishing the context necessary for understanding only with what is contained on that paper or screen. How is it possible for the writer to do this? By relying on what has worked in the past. And in this, writing is essentially conservative.

What has worked? The theme structure works: an introduction that uses standard techniques to get the reader’s attention and inform the reader of what the essay is about; body paragraphs that provide all the necessary details; a conclusion that unifies the essay and leaves the reader something to remember, some image that will recall the whole essay. That is what works. And for as long as there has been essay writing, it has always worked. And it will continue to work. And the reason is, the audience, that ghostly presence that is at the heart of written communication, can only make sense of what it has made sense of in the past. And what is past is the basis for a future audience, an audience that may not even be alive when the student is writing. Good writing, based on a predictable but flexible structure, makes the past present, guaranteeing a meaningful future, a future that invites all of us to “dance.”

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