ABSTRACT
Writing teachers ask students questions such as these to focus attention on “audience,” a concept in composition that has generated considerable theoretical discussion over the past 25 years. Once equated simply with the reader or readers of a text, “audience” in scholarly journals has now become “audiences,” and is accompanied by a set of complex terms such as “invoked,” “evoked,” “fictionalized,” “intended,” or “general.” However, despite the flurry of attention to audience as a theoretical issue, the concept of audience has had less of an impact in the writing class, because most students, when they think about audience, assume that they are writing for their teacher and are unaware of how audience awareness affects other aspects of a text, such as purpose, form, style, and genre. To foster student understanding of the importance of audience, some composition teachers will remind students to “consider your audience”—good advice, certainly, but difficult for students to follow, unless the teacher helps them understand the complexity of the concept and demonstrates how audience awareness is manifested within a text.
