Bailey Rhodes

Within the domains of pedagogy and scholarship, the burden of preventing misinterpretation is placed almost entirely upon the writer. Both scholarly and creative writers train themselves to write as they believe readers would think, and they often read their own work through the lens of an imaginary audience. Teachers and professors encourage students to be specific, define all terms in their writing, and construct personas so that they meet the needs of less ambiguous readers. The emphasis here is on the writer as the creator of meaning, but readers have an equally significant role of meaning-making and a responsibility to read ethically, considering what the writer intends to communicate. Since, as Andrea Lunsford points out in Naming What We Know, the boundaries between writer and audience have become hazy in the current digital age, there is a need “for audiences to fictionalize themselves . . . to adopt the role set out for them by the writer” (20), in order to prevent misunderstanding. Various scholars in the field have proposed theories regarding the definition of the audience or reader, the meaning and implications of rhetorical ethics, and the means by which readers can practice ethical reading habits.

As discussed by Lisa Ede and Lunsford in their article “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy,” two common models of audience prevail in the field of rhetoric and composition. The “Audience Addressed” model holds that readers have more agency than writers, in that the writer determines whether their work has achieved its purpose based on how the reader reacts. Readers are encouraged to play an active role in the meaning-making process of writing. Ede and Lunsford propose the ways in which this model is “wrong in failing to recognize the equally essential role writers play . . . not only as creators but also as readers of their own writing” (158). Another model of audience is “Audience Invoked,” a concept of which Walter Ong is a major proponent. In this model, readers bear the responsibility of embracing the identity of the writer’s imaginary audience, so as to experience the text as the writer intended. Ede and Lunsford point out that, in this model, Ong “fails . . . to acknowledge that readers’ own experiences, expectations, and beliefs do play a central role in their reading of a text” (165), thus underestimating the contribution of the reader to a text. Ellen C. Carillo, in her article “Reimagining the Role of the Reader in Common Core State Standards,” agrees that views such as these are “focusing on objectivity rather than the role of the reader in the composition of meaning.” She examines that Common Core state standards promote this second model of audience and, thus, “disconnect the text from the reader, severing the important relationship upon which reading depends” (29). Instead, Ede and Lunsford propose that readers have the agency to choose to play the role the writer has for them, or to reject it.

According to Brad E. Lucas’ review of James E. Porter’s Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing, Porter expresses that rhetorical ethics involves the relationship between a writer and reader of a text. He portrays Porter’s view that “rhetorical ethics” represents “a set of implicit understandings between writer and audience about their relationship.” In this sense, rhetorical ethics involves a sort of compromise between writers and readers and a preserving of their relationship “through acts of discourse” (“Rhetorical Ethics”). If rhetorical ethics necessitates this relationship, then readers—just as well as writers—have the ability to prevent misunderstanding through ethical habits. Carillo cites that Alice Horning “has noted that ‘apprentice readers should engage in dialogue among texts and authors, be engaged in talk about texts, and draw upon their own experiences and understanding to reach higher levels of reading comprehension’ (48)” (33). In fact, Carillo reveals, colleges expect students to be skilled in conversing with the writer based on where the writer’s intentions meet their experiences as readers. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) expresses that, once students are “sophisticated readers and producers of multimodal work”—multimodal meaning texts that incorporate visuals, audio, and linguistics—they must be taught “how these works make meaning, how they are based on conventions, and how they are created for and respond to specific communities or audiences” (“Multimodal Literacies”). Porter and Carillo express that viewing reading as a relational conversation with the writer is necessary to ethical reading.

Ethical reading seems to require a balance between readers bringing their own experiences to a text and allowing the author to converse by reading through the lens of the author’s intentions. The NCTE concludes, “We must be able to approach others with generosity, alert to the differences in language use and in assumptions about what constitutes appropriate communication in any context,” which obliges readers to put effort into being aware of the context, or rhetorical situation, in which the author is writing. Additionally, the NCTE cites Anne Wysocki, who claims that “We need to be good at recognizing the range of strategies others use in communicating, and at figuring out how to open and carry on conversations . . . with others” (“Multimodal Literacies”). To converse well with others, writers and readers must seek to understand one another, readers choosing to read as writers and writers choosing to write as readers. Perhaps, misunderstandings could be avoided through this form of ethical conversation that gives readers an equally important role in making meaning out of the writer’s text.

Carillo, Ellen C. “Reimagining the Role of the Reader in the Common Core State Standards.” English Journal, vol. 105, no. 3, 2016, pp. 29-35.

Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 35, no. 2, 1984, pp. 155–171. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/358093. Accessed 1 Oct. 2020.

Lucas, Brad E. “Rhetorical Ethics.” Review of Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing, by James E. Porter. Kairos, vol. 4, no. 1, 1999, kairos.technorhetoric.net/4.1/reviews/lucas/.

Lunsford, Andrea. “Writing Addresses, Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences.” Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle. University Press of Colorado, 2016, pp. 20-21.

“Multimodal Literacies.” National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), 17 Nov. 2005, https://ncte.org/statement/multimodalliteracies/.