Audience Addressed Audience Invoked Summary

Ashley Burns

Comp 300

October 2, 2013

Audience Addressed Audience Invoked Summary

        In May, 1984 the National Council of Teachers of English published Audience Addressed Audience Invoked: The role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy written by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford. Ede and Lunsford in this writing try to prove the relationship between reading and writing. Using the use of another scholar’s writing, specifically Ruth Mitchell and Mary Taylor’s “The Integrating Perspective: An Audience-Response Model.” They both agree to disagree with some of the topics in their writing, but use it help with their argument. Ede and Lunsford say that there should be and audience addressed, which emphasizes the concrete reality and “to share the assumption that knowledge of this audience’s attitudes, beliefs and expectations is not only possible but essential (Ede and Lunsford, 103). As well as the other side which is audience invoked, which is the “invoked stress that the audience of a written discourse is a construction of the writer, a created fiction” (108). Ede and Lunsford go into both these topics more detail, as well as looking at Mitchell and Taylor’s view on it.

        As said above there is audience addressed and audience invoked, Mitchell and Taylor both go into audience addressed and audience invoked. In audience addressed Mitchell and Taylor use two composition models that one focuses on the writer and the other on the written product itself. As Mitchell and Taylor explain it the “writer model is limited because it defines writing as either self-expression or fidelity to fact.” Whereas, “written product model is characterized by an emphasis on certain intrinsic features such as a lack of comma splices and fragment” (104). Mitchell and Taylor still critique it by saying neither pay attention to intervention, however their own model that they use has the same problem. Ede and Lunsford mention how they don’t even concern themselves with where “the material” comes from and its sophistication and complexity. As well as they leave out some of the other elements. Although Mitchell and Taylor try they still don’t come through with bringing in all the components for audience addressed. Then there is audience invoked which in this case they use Russell Long and Walter Ong’s scholarly article “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction.” In this Ong has two assertions one is the writer must construct his imagination clear enough for the audience to cast some sort of a role and secondly must in one way or another fictionalize itself (109).  Ong then continues to go into speaking and writing and the difference between your audiences. In the end though he says “if the writer succeeds in writing it is generally because he can fictionalize in his imagination an audience he has learned to know from daily life but from earlier writers… (111). Thus addressing audience invoked. Although both are different they still have similarities and overall as a writer you should be writing as fully knowing your audience and not writing to your audience.