Addressed or Invoked?

Audience, it is such a central part of reading and writing but it is also something that is hard to define. The article, "Audience Addressed/ Audience Invoked: The role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy" by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford discussed audience and how it is hard to define for a reader or writer. The main two components was an addressed audience and an invoked audience.

An addressed audience is one that the reader or writer are trying to get their message out to. They are the ones whose opinion matters, the real people reading or listening to the piece. With an addressed audience the importance of the writer is not essential. A theory mentioned int he article was by Mitchell and Taylor and their central theme was the audience, what the writer did was irrelevant. That is the key difference between an addressed audience and an invoked one.

An invoked audience is created by the writer, he fictionalizes his audience and creates a role for them to play in his piece. This is harder than Ong portrayed it to be in the previous article. The reason for this lies in the fact that sometimes the reader may not catch on or play the role created for them, due to the pressure placed on the writer by the reader. "to acknowledge that readers own experiences, expectations and beliefs do play a central role in their reading of a text, and that the writer who does not consider the needs and interests of his audience risks loosing that audience" (pg. 88). There is a lot that the writer needs to take into consideration to gain the reader's attention.

All in all defining an audience is difficult to do because there are so many variations of what the term can mean. It "refers not just to the intended, actual or eventual readers of a discourse, but to all those whose image, ideas, or actions influence a writer during the process of composition" (pg. 92). An audience then depends on the writer and the reader because that is what pieces of texts are used for, to be read by someone.