Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, edited by Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola, National Council of Teachers of English, 2011, pp. 77-95.

In the article, “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford observe that in the discussion of the importance of audience “the arguments advocated by each side of the current debate oversimplify the act of making meaning through written discourse” (78). Ede and Lunsford support their claim by examining and criticizing the arguments of those who believe the audience is addressed and those who believe that audience is invoked, as well as offering their own “alternate formulation” (78). Their purpose is to show a more dynamic view in order to look at the relationship between author and audience. They clearly state their audience as the editor of the scholarly journal in which they were published, the readers of that journal, as well as the writers of the essays they examined in their own; they also acknowledge that their audience is not static and it may change. As a student and a possible future teacher, I enjoyed their deconstruction of both sides of the argument and found it helpful that they offered an alternative somewhere in the middle of the chasm.