Ede's "On Audience and Composition"

Ede, Lisa S. “On Audience and Composition.” College Composition and Communication 30.3 (1979): 291-5.

From my vantage point nearly 35 years later, this 1979 article sounds familiar yet also reads like an artifact of a time in composition that I often read about in histories of the field.  Ede seeks to draw attention to audience as an insufficiently addressed topic, asserting the instruction ignores audience in a way not justified by either theory or good sense.  Most of the article consists of a review of literature that notably addresses the role of audience or has been complicit in shutting audience-awareness out in favor of other concerns.  She begins with Aristotle and his awareness that people’s responses vary with their mindsets.  The next major figure she notes is Edward Tyrell Channing, a Harvard professor whose major influence on the teaching of composition led to the elision of audience as a major concern and the introduction of the concept of the “general audience.”   Ede observes a long pattern of practice similar to Channing’s, but she notes several important exceptions of textbook authors who address audience as a concern for the writer. 

This brings her to the time of her writing, about which she notes that “two of the most influential contemporary rhetorical theories, Kenneth Pike’s tagmemics and Kenneth Burke’s dramatistics, emphasize the necessity of establishing a bond between the rhetor and his or her audience” (292).  She also notes several other theorists active at the time who resist the current-traditional  emphasis on “product over process, style and usage over content, editing over invention” (292).  Next, Ede notes the role of psychologists in our concept of audience, including Flower’s study of Piaget and Vygotsky’s concepts of egocentric or inner speech, which Flower connects to students’ tendency to transcribe their inner speech instead of composing for an outside audience.

At this point, Ede begins making explicit connections to the way we craft writing assignments.  She notes that some attempts to create a genuine audience fail because they simply assign an audience (such as the student’s classmates or the instructor) without creating a rhetorical situation.  She cites two ways of designing assignments that offer more context.  First, she cites Field and Weiss’s elaborately described, imaginary rhetorical situations that help a students imagine an audience and a reason for addressing it.  Second, she describes her own choice to allow students to invent audiences and to require them to analyze their audiences and articulate the context for each paper.  Her only requirement for identifying an audience is that there must be a realistic way to address that audience; as a result, she has seen several papers actually make their way to the audience for whom the student wrote. 

Although parts of this article were certainly dated, it is a revealing window into an important time in our field, and Ede’s clear writing and practical views make it worth reading, especially in the context of our course reading on the application of theory in the writing classroom.