AUDIENCES

(Looking at Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy”)

Despite the cumbersome and somewhat humorless title, this is a terrific essay.  I really like how Ede and Lunsford, in equal measures, go after the “audience addressed” camp (Mitchell, Taylor and Pfister, Petrik) and the “audience invoked” group (Long and Ong). They do this in order to clear a bit of space for their “alternative” (figure two on page 166 of the article).  Figure two is, if I am reading it correctly, a middle ground that allows for both conceptualizations of audience to function simultaneously.  Each side of this contentious debate has failed to recognize “the fluid, dynamic character of rhetorical situations; and 2. the integrated, interdependent nature of reading and writing” (156). 

The Audience Addressed Fallacy 

(With the term “fallacy” I am deliberately trying to incorporate something from English 577, in order to appeal to, and possibly impress, Dr. Cauthen.)

Ede and Lunsford see some real problems here.  In this fallacy, writers are too reliant on their audience for making meaning.  In fact, they may go so far as to pander to their audience.  I distinctly remember that Plato thought the sophists were up to this trick.  Part of the problem with the “audience addressed” crowd is that they are rooted in speech communication and cognitive psychology, according to Ede and Lunsford.  Also, the audience-addressed camp overemphasizes structure to the detriment of invention.  They do not concern themselves with the material’s “sophistication, complexity, accuracy, or rigor” (157).  They completely forget that writers are also readers of their own writing.  And I know this to be true of me.  I almost always write for myself, at least, in part, hearing a kind of internal dialogue as I write.  This writing for the audience stuff, in Ede and Lunsford’s mind (and mine), seems pretty shallow.  Without deeper reasons and discovery processes (invention and ethical concerns), we might as well all be writing TV commercials. 

The Audience Invoked Fallacy

This group of writers has created their own audience and this is clearly a problem.  These writers “provide cues for the reader” (160) in order to define their ideal readers.  In full disclosure, I must admit that I sometimes do this, without really meaning to.  Sometimes I write something and, if it’s going in a kind of witty direction, I invoke Dorothy Parker, Alexander Wolcott, and Harpo Marx (The Algonquin Round Table, which intrigued me at a strangely early age.  You will hear about them in my much-anticipated Literacy Autobiography.).  Other times, I am trying to strip away more layers and write more honestly, more deeply (say more in fewer words).  In that case, I try to imagine Ernest Hemingway reading my work.  Dramatic works (one-act plays, monologues, and scenes for my middle-school thespians) I invariably want to please Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, and Tennessee Williams.  (I love Shakespeare, but never try to write for him.)  I sometimes think that my imaginary friends/audiences (however invoked) actually help me to write better. 

As I consider this essay, I can’t help but think that writing for people who showed the slightest bit of interest in what I had to say made all the difference.  When I started as an undergrad in Dr. Giannotti’s class, I had been a stay-at-home mother for several years.  Before that, I believed myself to be an actress.  I had always loved to read and write, but I had no confidence whatsoever that I could write.  When I got my first essay back from Dr. Giannotti, and saw that he actually liked what I said and how I said it, despite the fact that I had no idea how to do parenthetical citations, I was a changed person. 

I think that we are all linked to some kind of audience.  I write very differently when I write entirely for me.  Usually it is with bullet points and has something to do with lists and involves cleaning toilets, grading papers, or going to Trader Joe’s.  I cannot actually write anything if I don’t, in some way, hear an audience’s “um hum” in my head and in some way see them nod in approval, or at least understanding.  But this is just me. 

Whichever way you want to frame it, “audience addressed” or “audience invoked” (I now think that I am a little bit more in danger of falling into the “audience-invoked” camp), audience is critical to the writing process.  (Right now, I am thinking of my fellow students and hoping that they don’t think that I am overtired or have lost my mind.)  I really liked the diagram on page 166 of this essay but see it as just a great blend of the two camps.  The writers here take a common sense approach.  What I really think is this:  If you get excited about what you have to say, writing is fun and exciting.  It is never easy (at least to do well), but it is one of the most thrilling things I can think of doing.  This is what I tell my middle school students and this is what I firmly believe.