Idiolect, Isolect, and the Space Between:
Intentionality, Absence, and the Work of Reading
B.M. Scott
28 November 2025
Every act of reading is a negotiation between two different, but overlapping, forms of language: the writer’s idiolect and the audience’s isolect. The idiolect is the writer’s singular pattern of usage—their preferred metaphors, rhythms, syntactic habits, private obsessions, and signature turn-of-phrase. The isolect is the shared repertoire of meanings, references, and expectations that belong to a particular community, discipline, subculture, or historical moment. Reading well means standing in the space between these two registers and learning to feel and understand their friction. On the one hand, the idiolect is where voice lives. It is the mark of an individual consciousness pressed into language. It is what lets us recognize an author even out of context - viz. the peculiar way the author leans on certain words, unfolds an argument, or stages a scene. On the other hand, the isolect is what makes communication possible at all. Without a shared lexicon and a shared sense of how words usually behave, the singularity of the idiolect would collapse into noise - a purely private language with no access point for others.
To read is to ask, constantly and often unconsciously: "how much of what I see here belongs to this one writer’s peculiarities, and how much belongs to the larger language-world they inhabit and address?" If everything is read as idiolect—pure eccentricity—then the text becomes hermetically sealed, interpretable only by appealing to biography, pathology, or mystique. If everything is read as isolect—pure convention—then the text becomes interchangeable with any other instance of its genre or discourse, and the author disappears into cliché and formula. The critic’s craft, and the attentive reader’s pleasure, lies in holding these together. When a writer breaks a rule of grammar, bends a genre convention, or drags a word into an unusual context - the reader has to decide: is this a mistake (a misalignment with the isolect), or a meaningful deviation (an assertion of idiolect against the grain)? This decision is not just pedantic; it determines whether we read the moment and what the author is signaling.
When we study the absence of meaning we engage with the foundation of meaning, and the intentionality of writing. Apparent absence of meaning shows up in many forms: silence on a crucial topic, an ellipsis where we expect explanation, an image that refuses to resolve into a clear symbol, a contradiction that the text never bothers to reconcile. These moments can be frustrating, but they are also diagnostic. They expose the joints of meaning and how it is made. An absence can signal different things depending on how it sits between idiolect and isolect. If a scientific article omits basic definitions that any specialist in its field is assumed to know, that absence is isolective: the community’s shared knowledge is silently presupposed. The apparent lack of meaning is, in fact, a sign of dense, taken-for-granted meaning. By contrast, when a poet withholds an expected explanation, or leaves a narrative gap that never quite closes, the absence may belong to the writer’s idiolect: a deliberate openness that invites the reader to inhabit the text rather than simply consume a finished statement.
To speak of the “intentionality of writing” is to say that writing is not just the production of marks on a page, but the directing of attention through language. Intentionality, in a phenomenological sense, is always situated as the underlying cause - viz., consciousness is always consciousness of something. In writing, intentionality is the causality within the text as aimed by the writer and as received by the reader. It is not only what the text says, but what it is trying to do—inform, seduce, unsettle, clarify, conceal, or transform. However, the writer’s intention is never the whole story. The idiolect encodes more than the writer consciously decides - that is to say, it carries residues of earlier readings, social positions, unexamined assumptions, and unconscious desires. Likewise, the isolect is not a neutral backdrop; it is structured by power, history, and exclusion. A writer may intend one thing, but the isolect of their audience may be attuned to hear another. When gaps of meaning appear—when something falls flat, offends, or inspires unexpected interpretations—those gaps often mark the fault lines where personal intentionality runs up against the inertia and complexity of the larger language-world.
What, then, does it mean to “study the absence of meaning”? It means treating ambiguity and silence not as mere errors to be corrected, but as sites of inquiry. When a text fails to speak to a certain audience, that failure reveals the limits of its assumed isolect: who it imagines as a “normal” reader, what background knowledge it presupposes, what experiences it does not consider legible. When a passage resists paraphrase, that resistance can reveal the density of the writer’s idiolect: a knot where many strands of association and intention are braided together too tightly to be flattened into a single “message.” Working with these absences, the reader becomes a co-intentional agent. Meaning is not simply extracted from the text; it is enacted in the encounter between idiolect and isolect. To read attentively is to ask: what kind of absence is this? What does this text refuse to say, or not yet know how to say, and why? How is that refusal grounded in the writer’s singular voice, and how is it shaped by the expectations and blind spots of the community for whom (and against whom) the text is written?
The Foundations Revealed
In conclusion, the study of meaninglessness is a study of meaning’s root-cause. Where understanding fails, the pillars of understanding are suddenly visible. The tension between an author’s idiolect and an audience’s isolect is not an obstacle to be eliminated, but the very condition under which meaning appears. Intentionality inhabits that tension: the writer’s directedness toward a hoped-for comprehension, and the reader’s directedness toward a not-yet-fully-known significance. To read, then, is not to stand outside this dynamic and decode a preexisting content, but to participate in the ongoing negotiation that makes language a living medium. The absences that trouble us—those blank spaces where meaning seems to falter—are often the most honest moments in that negotiation. They remind us that every text is both a singular event of expression and a gesture within a larger, shared, and always incomplete field of sense. In Mortimer Adler’s terms, reading is always a kind of dialogue between reader and author, and the tension between idiolect and isolect is the shifting ground on which that conversation takes place.
Questions for Reflection
The foregoing analysis has explored how every act of analytic reading unfolds in the tension between an author’s idiolect and a community’s isolect, with particular attention to intentionality, ambiguity, and the productive role of absence. What follows are several questions designed to help readers examine their own practices of reading in light of this dynamic, attending not only to what texts say, but also to what they leave unsaid and how that silence is shared, resisted, or reimagined.
- When you think about your own favorite authors, what specific features of their idiolect—rhythms, images, argumentative habits—do you recognize, and how do those features interact with your own isolect as a reader?
- Can you recall a moment when you initially read something as an error or awkwardness, but later came to see it as a deliberate stylistic choice? What changed in your sense of the isolect or the writer’s idiolect?
- Think of a text that once seemed “meaningless” or opaque to you - perhaps too mundane or nihilistic; or perhaps it falls apart to silence and redirection of the narrative. In retrospect, do you see that absence as a gap in your own isolect - an aspect of the writer’s idiolect - or a fault line between the two?
- Where in your own reading life have you encountered a silence or omission that felt ethically significant—something not said about suffering, power, or identity? How might that absence be shaped by the isolect the text assumes?
- How does the idea of reading as a dialogue between idiolect and isolect alter the way you approach disagreement with an author?
- How can Mortimer Adler's vision help us approach reading as a meaningful dialogue with the author - viz., intentional, analytic reading in lieu of absorbing information passively.