Audience: Direct, Addressed, Imagined, But Not a Total FictionBy Michelle Holzworth

The Major Curiosity•How have communication technologies

changed the notion of authorship?

•Social media sites pose a challenge to some of the key claims on audience, as well as reinforce them.

•Tone troubles

•Poor persona

•Backlash

The Major Concern

The Major Concern• What Ong, Lunsford, and Ede have to say about

audience is not quite enough of an understanding for writing in a modern societal context.

• We need to update these underlying ideas to educate students on real rewards to audience awareness and consequences of audience unawareness.

▫Although academic writing is perhaps the least affected by [21st century communication technologies], other areas of writing are experiencing paradigm shifts that challenge prior conceptualizations of audience, raising a question of how exactly teach this rhetorical element in college composition.

Organization:•This paper reviews two key theoretical

contributions as a basis for understanding audience, challenge these notions by putting them into a modern context, and after contemporizing those works, proposes three pedagogical considerations.

▫The Theoretical Basis▫The Modern Context▫The Pedagogical Proposals

Key Points from Ong:•Readers are remote from each other

▫“Audience” is misleading; “readership” is abstract

•Readers are remote from the writer

•Reader feedback is conjectural

Key Points from Ong:Two implications for writing:

•“First, that the writer must construct in his imagination, clearly or vaguely, an audience cast in some sort of role…Second, we mean that the audience must correspondingly fictionalize itself” (Ong 60).

▫Lunsford and Ede contest the lack of reader agency in this conceptualization.

Key Points from Lunsford and Ede• Proponents of both the addressed and invoked

sides have “failed adequately to recognize (1) the fluid, dynamic character of rhetorical situations, and (2) the integrated, interdependent nature of reading and writing” (78).

• “The most complete understanding of audience thus involves a synthesis of the perspectives we have termed audience addressed, with its focus on the reader, and audience invoked, with its focus on the writer” (90).

▫I agree with this and specify what this synthesis of perspectives actually looks like.

My Key Counter Claims:•Lunsford and Ede really beat me to the punch line,

but…“Readers’ reactions are remote and initially conjectural,” claims Ong (66).

Teachers give immediate and real feedback to student writing.

Web writing (particularly on social media) undermines his claim.

My Key Claims:•Communication technologies have also

empowered readers and altered author-audience relationship – readers shape writers▫Take a look at journalism and publishing,

which now can capitalize on crowdsourcing

▫Peter Clifton: Because of the “rise of the direct audience”

enabled by social media, publishers now have an expectation for writers to “connect with their reading audience” (108).

My (Research’s) Key Claims

•Ong’s idea of fictionalizing an audience is not obsolete; it is rather relevant

▫Eden Litt: “The imagined audience construct is

worth understanding better because while we are dependent on the imagination as a guide during social media use, it is the actual audience on the other side of the screen reacting and judging the performance” (333).

My (Research’s) Key Claims• Imagined audience vs. the actual

audience:“based on an interaction of macro-level factors (e.g., social norms, roles, and technological infrastructure) and micro-level factors (e.g., motivation, attitude, social skills, and Internet skills)” (Litt 334).

•Clearly, Lunsford and Ede’s model encompasses just one small piece out of several complicated factors—that of reader roles.

My Key Claims•Something’s missing, here…or some

things…

The Proposals• 1: Let’s examine the rhetoric of social media and

its the differences and similarities to scholarly writing.

• 2: We should help student writers appropriate the concept of audience, striking a balance between Elbow’s thoughts in “Closing My Eyes As I Speak” and Bartholomae’s in “Inventing the University”.

• 3: We need to understand our reader role in student writing to provide effective feedback:

Invoked: Reader ignorance and/or the devil’s advocate Addressed: Constructive critic and/or evaluator

Works Cited Holzworth 1

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Third Ed.

Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola. Urbana: NCTE, 2011. 523-553. Print.

Clifton, Peter. “Teach Them to Fish: Empowering Authors to Mark Themselves Online.” 106-109.

Publishing Research Quarterly. April 27 2010. Web. November 17 2013.

Elbow, Peter. “Closing My Eyes As I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” 50-69. College

English Vol. 49, No. 1. January 1987. Web. November 17 2013.

Litt, Eden. “Knock, Knock. Who’s There? The Imagined Audience.” 330-342. Journal of Broadcasting

& Electronic Media. September 2012. Web. November 17 2013.

Lunsford, Andrea and Lisa Ede. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked.” Cross-Talk in Comp

Theory. Third Ed. Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola. Urbana: NCTE, 2011. 77-96. Print.

Maranto, Gina, Matt Burton. “Paradox and Promise: MySpace, Facebook, and the Sociopolitics of

Social Networking in the Classroom.” Computers and Composition 27. 36-47. Web. November

17 2013.

Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Third Ed.

Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola. Urbana: NCTE, 2011. 55-76. Print.