Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) April 1, 2026: I have written about two courses that I taught at the University of Duluth before I retired at the end of May 2009: (1) "My UMD Course Literacy, Technology, and Society, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" (dated September 14, 2025; viewed 1,642 times as of April 1, 2026); and (2) "My UMD Course on the Bible as Literature, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" (dated September 19, 2025; viewed 2,032 times as of April 1, 2026):
However, I taught sections of the required Advanced Writing course far more often than I taught either of those introductory-level survey courses.
In both Advanced Writing courses that I taught at UMD, I had the students do library research and write a term paper with proper documentation.
To set up their term papers, the student needed to imagine and write out a scenario of a fictional setting where they were employed and where there was a problem and where the decision was made to bring in somebody to conduct workshops for the employees on how to address the problem.
By having the students imagine such scenarios and write out their scenarios, I was requiring them to imagine their fictional audience. I required them to imagine their fictional audience because I was deeply impressed with Ong's article "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction" in PMLA, volume 90, number 1 (January 1975): pp. 9-22. Ong reprinted it in his book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1977, pp.53-81). This is Ong's most frequently reprinted article.
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