I can’t quite believe I’m going to open
this by linking to a TV Tropes page, but I can’t not. Here you go:
Also, the CONDUIT metaphor FTW!
1.
That night, he had a
stomachache
Woohoo! The Hungry Caterpillar’s in the
house! Again! My eldest son loves this book. Or, more specifically, he loves me
reading this book to him. This is an important clarification, I think,
particularly with regards to the Jakobson’s notions of addresser and addressee.
Books aimed at young kids aren’t really aimed at young kids, they’re aimed at
their parents. I don’t just mean in the sense that they’ll be the ones buying
the books, but that they’ll be reading
them as well. These are written texts specifically designed to be read aloud by
someone other than their author, in order to be heard by their ‘real’ target
audience. The mediation is assumed and built in (we’ll ignore the illustrations
for now). There’s a blurb quote on the back of The Gruffalo’s Child that, “Donaldson makes poets of us all.”
Donaldson and Carle aren’t just writing books for children, they’re writing
books to be read to children, and that’s another layer of complexity to factor
into notions of their ideal reader. On which note…
2.
The Order of Things
“As we create this text, we have no way of
knowing anything about you, our current reader…”
Seems a little odd to be stating this in a
document with “Unit 2” written at the top. C’mon guys, show a little faith in your
course design will you? You’ve certainly got a hell of a lot more to go on that
Eric or Julia there. This is the second unit of the second module of a
postgraduate programme at a Russell Group university, if you really do have no way of knowing anything about its
likely readership that I’d suggest that your selection procedures are in fairly
urgent need of a revamp.
Likely is the key word in that last sentence. Of course there will be a
large range in readership, but it’s perfectly reasonable to assume certain
things (yes, including that people will start with Unit 1), and I’d argue that
in this text it’s more reasonable to assume more things than in most others. And
of course, you’ll never be able to perfectly predict everything about every
possible reader, but we’re getting into smaller and smaller probabilities here.
Newton pretty much developed calculus for just this reason. You can sit about arguing about
whether it’s possible to catch a tortoise all you like, but if
almost but not absolute probabilities are good enough for a law of thermodynamics
to be based upon, they’ll serve for this as well. Of course assumptions are
made, but it’s demonstrably wrong to imply that those assumptions are built
from scratch every single time.
3.
Where wings take dream…
Imagined
Readership and Target
Audience should, in effective writing, pretty much overlap. Would that be a
fair statement? The diabetes stuff in the Coulthard reading seems to be an
example of what happens when they don’t. I’m also slightly perplexed by this notion
of ‘averring’, which in my head is being glossed as ‘stating something as fact’.
The perplexion (is that a word?) stems from the assertions Coulthard makes regarding
incumbency and obligation (p6). Are these incumbencies in the same sense as
Grice’s maxims, in that they’re assumed by the reader and therefore noticed
when absent? Or is Coulthard just trying to lay out stylistic recommendations
for ‘good writing’? In which case surely it’s genre specific? I know the lines are
increasingly blurred, but expressing a “personal
evaluation of the averral” would seem singularly inappropriate in news
reporting as reportage, but entirely necessary in editorial writing.
It also seems to presuppose that clear
communication is what is desired on the part of the writer. Which brings us
back to the target audience and Bush. My own contention is that Dubya was
actually an excellent communicator, he just wasn’t trying to communicate with
me or others towards the left of the political spectrum. He and his advisors
were quite happy to let 49% of the American people act as mere listeners, and
the rest of the world as overhearers, as long as the 50% + one vote of American
voters he actually was addressing responded favourably. We think he sounded ignorant, they
think he sounded heartfelt and sincere. I have no doubt that the other
passengers who heard me reading Wibbly Pig to my boys on the plane had
similarly divergent feelings from the people I was actually addressing.
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