[page numbers indicate reading from edited collections rather than original journal article]
Ede and Lunsford characterize “audience addressed” as the assumptions that writers must know—or learn about—the attitudes, beliefs and expectations of their readers. “Audience invoked,” on the other hand, is a theory based on the idea that the writer invokes an audience by providing cues that tell the reader what role the writer wants the reader to play. Ede and Lunsford do not identify so much with either side as argue that writers need to have skills to both invoke readers and to anticipate and address readers, depending on the rhetorical situation. Ede and Lunsford expand further: “Those who envision audience as 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 (via observation and analysis) but essential” (180). Such individuals encourage “real-world” writing, influenced as they are by audience analysis in speech communication and cognitive psychology research on the composing process. Ede and Lunsford also expand further on the second role of audience: “Those who envision audience as invoked stress that the audience of a written discourse is a construction of the writer…The central task of the writer, then, is not to analyze an audience and adapt discourse to meet its needs. Rather, the writer uses the semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader—cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text” (184). Ede and Lunsford then address what writing asks of writers, including discursive adaptations to meet the needs and expectations of an addressed audience or responses to the intervention of others (189). Ultimately, though, the authors state that “the most complete understanding of audience thus involves a synthesis of the perspectives…termed audience addressed, with its focus on the reader, and audience invoked, with its focus on the writer” (191). Because of the complex reality to which the term audience refers and because of its fluid, shifting role in the composing process, any discussion of audience which isolates it from the rest of the rhetorical situation or which radically overemphasizes or underemphasizes its function in relation to other rhetorical constraints is likely to oversimplify. (192)
