Ede and Lundsford Response

In Ede and Lundsford's article the authors start by addressing a simple problem writing teachers have: "to be for or against an emphasis on audience in composition courses." The purpose of the article is to expand the writers mind on the role an audience plays in writing development.

Ede and Lundsford address that there are two types of audience writing and they are "audience addressed" and "audience invoked." Audience addressed concerns itself with how writers write to a specific audience. In this case Ede and Lundsford say that the audience is "real." This type of audience is not fictionalized but rather a real person or real group. My understanding of this theory states that the writer could be writing to head of a company or lobbying to a pharmaceutical group. The authors believe the problem with this theory is that it places too much emphasis on how the audience reacts to the writing and less on the creative development of the writer.

"Audience invoked" theory addresses a more emotional feeling from the reader that the writer is trying to generate. Focus is on the writers ability to portray what he is feeling to the reader. The process in writing to the audience is more creative and fictionalized than "audience addressed." I believe the problem with this is that is very hard to do and especially hard to teach. This ability to develop and sustain a specific type of audience and develop emotion and feeling based on that audience is not something every high school or college student can do. It is a very involved creative process that only good writers can achieve.

To be honest, I did not have too much of an issue with either processes that Ede and Lundsford discuss in the article. Each theory, whether it be "audience addressed" or "audience invoked," has its place in composition theory. I can imagine that "audience addressed" technique is used a great deal in the business world where formal writing can be a little narrow and to the point. Nevertheless, this type of writing still has a place and is used quite frequently. I can see the "audience invoked" style being used more in a literary sense, where you really want to focus on the reader/writer relationship. In this technique you are using more creative juices to fictualize the audience and focus on emotional response for the reader and can also be considered a valuable practice in compositional theory. Either processes can work given the right context; the important issue in Ede's article as well as Ong's article is that you consider the audience you are writing too.