Joseph Addison Seminar

This week, i did my seminar paper on Joseph Addison. Here are a few points that i picked out from the session and from hearing the other seminar paper that was given today.

At this time, journalism was only beginning to appear, as Addison discussed in "on the essay form". In this essay we see that he is an advocate of sharing knowledge with the public, which is supported by the fact that he was co-founder of several newspapers.

Addison understood that writers have a great impact on society, and as journalists we need to acknowledge this also. For example, many social rules and agreements, such as manners, are cultivated and upheld by the press, and using humour etc in writing gives the message that happiness is acheivable despite hardships in life and journalism can work to make this seem more natural.

Addison also points out that method and structure not only benefits the writer, for example when they are trying to express their thoughts, but also the reader, who is better able to understand if writing is clear and uncluttered. Therefore, Addison's writing is eloquent but understandable, showing that he has put thought into his readership and is trying to make sure that everyone can understand and share the knowledge, so that it is not confined to the intellectuals and "educated" classes. However, this emphasises the fact that only around 30% of the population at the time of Addison's writing could actually read, so even though he is targetting as wide an audience as possible, it would not have reached the lower classes. Despite this, his writing is much more accessible than most of the writing around at the time, which is why Addison was encouraging others to write for ordinary people in order to expand their knowledge. He thought that it was best to put "pearls in heaps before the reader" as it would be more enjoyable for them to aquire knowledge without, after reading, having to spend time deciphering the article and extracting the meaning. He laid the information straight out for the reader so they did not have to translate and he used structure so that it was not challenging to read. In this way he was very concious of his style and his audience, which is something that as journalists we must also be aware of.

Addison places great importance on written text over discussion and conversation. One advantage of it is that there is more time to think about the arguments and form them into something intelligible, it is also more direct and tangible and it is more likely to be believed than something heard on the grapevine. Conversation can be lost in time, whereas writing is much more permanent. All of these concepts apply to our time as well as Addisons, showing a universality in his contributions to journalism. It is important to remember when writing and reporting to research the subject and take into acount all sides of the argument and other points of view, this is something that Addison does continually, always putting both sides to the argument and playing devils advocate. One very clear example of this is in "Laughter".

The restoration period, in which Addison was writing, was very important in the spreading of knowledge and ideas and broadening of common knowledge. In this way, Addison was influential in introducing the use of humour as a method of appealing to the common man and grabbing the interest of the audience. This is an important technique as often after reading something, the humour is more memorable than the content of the article itself. Addison can often be seen to be mocking those who couldn't understand his humour which the more educated readers would have found exceedingly funny.

Addison's ambition to reach the common man and spread knowledge can be linked with Hobbes' social contract which says that we all have rights and responsibilities within society. Addison would argue that everyone should have common knowledge and be on a similar level of understanding in order to improve society. Locke's ideas on the spread of knowledge is also relevant here as he did not like the simple regurgitating of knowledge and opinions but wanted everyone to have their own view and express it, therefore if everyone had education and knowledge, everyone could express their own opinions.

Despite this similar thread in their writing, Locke and Addison were very different in not only their style but also their intended audience. Locke was writing for his close friends and so his style was converstational and often confusing, however Addison was writing to publish his work and aiming it at a certain audience, meaning that his style was much more formal and about more general subjects (if it was even about a subject and not just a humorous piece that seemed to be about nothing much in particular, which he often did).

I think the main point that I took out of the reading and this weeks' seminar is that Addison was an advocate, as co-founder of several newspapers, for the fact that society should make use of the press as a tool to transmit knowledge and views. One interesting observation from the other person taking the seminar was that "philosophers of the past would have made much better use of the press", however we have to remember that their writing would probably alienate much of the readership as they would not understand the concepts and would be put off by the serious nature of the writing. Also, if the philosphers of the past had had such a means of spreading knowledge, the world and discoveries would have turned out very differently than they did.