"Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked" by Lunsford and Ede is one of the more intuitive perspectives I've seen on audience. Speaking only for my own intuition, of course. Usually when people talk about audience, they talk about teaching students to consider whom they're addressing--"Audience Addressed". Assignment sheets (such as those we got from the 2nd years) specify an audience.
Ede and Lunsford (they like to switch their names around, so I oblige) refer to Russell Long, who doubts how effective such methods are. I probably side with Long. It depends on the assignment. If I ask my students to write a textual analysis, what kind of audience should I propose? Ethically, I find it's best to consider myself their audience. Because I'm grading their paper, and no matter how I construct the assignment, in the end, they have to write to me. I might question their argument's effectiveness on people of varying ideologies, but I will not pretend to stand in as a reader other than myself. I can only offer suggestions about how it might be read by others.
Yes, audience matters. I think Linda Flower makes that point best in "Writer-Based Prose." It's important to recognize that we have an audience. In the Writing Center, I frequently tell clients to remember, "Readers are stupid." Actually, it's not that readers are stupid--it's that they're ignorant. They are ignorant of the processes going on in the writer's mind. What looks clear to the writer is not so clear to someone else. So remembering that you have an audience matters.
But I wouldn't overemphasize analyzing one's audience. Like Long says, I wouldn't get bogged down in trying to pin down their socioeconomic status or race. It depends on the piece's purpose. If it's a persuasive piece, then crap yeah. You have to know who you're trying to persuade. And even an informative piece has to decide what the readers already know. These are the audience addressed. But Walter Ong is right in that we always have to fictionalize/invoke an audience. He's simply wrong in thinking that it's a peculiarly written phenomenon. For one thing, we have to pick an audience. Our audience addressed by a persuasive piece might be very large, but we know we can't persuade everyone, and so we invoke a particular segment of that audience. We also give our audience cues to know how we expect them to be listening. Particularly in creative pieces, we write what we want for whom we want, and who cares who we're actually addressing?
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Sometimes it seems like we tend to conflate audience and purpose. While many of us intuitively do know the what, where, and when of writing, for our students, there is often a fuzziness implied in our approach. It can be difficult to re-embody what we have intuitively assimilated: to rationally reconstruct it into a manner communicable to our students. Modeling is certainly one approach and a very valid one at that, but it is even better when it can be reinforced in a more systematic or focused manner.
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