0 INTRODUCTION

4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD
in front of them, so “[t]he historian, the scholar or scientist, and the simple letter writer all
fictionalize their audiences, casting them in a made-up role and calling on them to play
the role assigned” (Ong 1975: 17). Thus, readers have been assigned a set of features by
the writer and they must conform to this role, even though this role usually differs from
their role in real life. In this sense, as Ong (1975:12) points out, audience is always a
fiction. Although it has proved difficult to establish a clear identity for the audience, the
writer must make an effort to “adjust” and “accommodate” his discourse to the
characteristics of this fictional audience (Park 1982: 248). Along these lines, Hoey (2001:
14) argues that:
[t]he audience of a text is the intended readership, the imaginary person
or persons whom the writer addresses and whose questions s/he tries to
answer. Ultimately the audience is always a figment of the writer’s
imagination since no writer, however skilled, can ever get inside
someone else’s mind so completely as to know exactly what they want
and need to learn.
In science an author may decide the amount of technical vocabulary used in a
particular text taking into account the degree of familiarity with the topic that he assumes
in his audience. This assumed knowledge is also realized through the “other contexts and
other texts” to which the audience is assumed to have access (Eggins and Martin 1997:
233). However, it might also well be the case that some writers, instead of thinking about
their hypothetical audience, might be just trying to follow a specific format of writing.
However, such formats are still closely related with a specific kind of audience in that
they help to identify and fulfill the reader’s expectations (Park 1982: 254). In this
connection, Berkenkotter (1981: 393) maintains that writers who wrote to persuade, as in
the case of scientists (Gross 1990: 5), thought more often about their audience than those
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