Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

15.3 Indirect address
Unit 15 Positioning the reader or spectator
Section 3 Attributing meaning

While some texts address their readers directly by the use of ’you’, others engage the reader in more subtle ways by the use of indirect address. An important aspect of the use of indirect address is the invocation of background knowledge and assumptions. All texts, even the most simple and explicit, assume some degree of shared knowledge between the reader and the producer of the text. Sometimes, these knowledges or ideas are presented as if the reader is bound to agree with them, or are based upon implicit assumptions that prove difficult to object to.

For example, in an advertisement for Lil-lets tampons, which is headlined ’Lil-lets: the art of the self-protection’ and which shows in the background two women engaged in martial arts, it is assumed that the reader will bring to bear quite particular background assumptions about menstruation. The advertisement shows a ball and chain in the foreground, representing the women as being imprisoned by periods, together with the statement ’the small key to freedom’. It is assumed that the reader will agree with the implicit assertion that periods are imprisoning, that menstruation is something that women want to be ’discreet’ about, and that Lil-lets are a way out of this imprisonment (represented by Lil-lets as a key to the clasp on the chain). Even those women who do not in fact see their periods in such a negative way will, in order to make sense of the text, be led to draw on this shared knowledge about menstruation. (See Laws, 1990, for further discussion.)