Response to "Audience Addressed/

Response to “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked” by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford

While reading the section entitled “Audience Addressed”, I was reminded of my daughter’s complaints during the years that she worked at Borders. She reported the store catered to the mentality of the majority or average reader and that this resulted in a narrow selection of written discourse for marginalized groups of readers. She also reported of irate customers having complained about written discourse that supported social and moral judgments in opposition to their own. Obviously, publishers are driven by the audience or “what sells” in order to make a profit. As the authors point out, writing adjusted to meet expectations of the audience without regard for the motives of the writer can lack truthfulness and “tends to undervalue the responsibility a writer has to a subject” (Ede, Lunsford, 82). However, Ong’s who emphasizes the creative role the writer plays in written discourse fails to take into account “the constraints place on the writer, in certain situations, by the audience (88). Having spent years in an academic environment, all of us can identify with this. I found the authors’ diagram on page 89, labeled figure 2, helps to sort out the complexity of the concept of “audience.”