Ede and Lunsford take a look into addressing the audience in writing. They look upon Mitchell and Taylor who emphasize the audience addressed model. The audience addressed "emphasize the concrete reality of the writer's audience; they also share the assumption that knowledge of this audience's attitudes, beliefs and expectations is not only possible...but essential" (78). I was confused when the article quotes Pfister and Petrik saying students should "construct in their imagination an audience that is as nearly a replica as is possible of those many readers who actually exist in the world of reality" (79). Are they saying you should fictionalize your audience to be everyone who exists, thus making your audience broad and general?
An invoked audience find the audience of a written discourse to be the contruction of the writer (a created fiction) to be important. Supporters of an invoked audience argue that writers can't know the reality the same way that speakers do. Therefore, the main task of the writer is to use the semantic/syntactic language resources of language to give the reader cues to help define the role the writer wants the reader to possess.
Ede and Lunsford then critique both ways to look at audience, and after doing so wonder if there is an alternative to these incomplete conceptions of the role of audience in writing. They then suggest that the writer must establish the range of potential roles their audience may play (89). Overall, the audience addressed focuses on the reader while the audience invoked focuses on the writer. To conclude, to write for an audience means to balance the creativity of the writer in conjunction with the creativity of the reader. You must keep in mind the wide range of potential reader roles of invoked and addressed audiences.
I'm not quite sure my opinion on this article because I feel like I don't fully understand it. I'm going to try to read it again more carefully to get a better grip on it, but for now I'm not too certain of how the article suggests to write for an audience in action.
2 comments:
Lindsay,
I actually read your summary/response to help me better understand the article and craft my own response. However, I'm still not sure I understand the full extent of the article.
Even if we both agree that we didn't understand the article, it's funny that we reached the same conclusion- I too believe that Ede and Lundsford think that audience addressed and audience invoked both have positives and negatives.
Both of which raise questions about our criteria for understanding something.
I hate the onion analogy, but here it may be appropriate, that htere are many laters of understanding the successively peel off, from the skin of knowing what each word in the article means, to the core of what was in the writer's soul during composition, which, I hold, the author does not even understnad. Such is the tricky nature of language; a language we were TAUGHT (I always remember) and that we did not choose; a language whose words each carry political and cultural assumpsions we totally overlook as they spew out of our mouths.
Sick, aint it?
:)
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