Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy. Both views miss the dynamic quality of rhetorical situations and the interdependence of reading and writing. Rather, both senses of audience must be understood within the larger rhetorical situation and the many possible roles that may be taken by real readers and imagined by the writer. Braddock Award winner.
Some audiences help writers think better, others inhibit or intimidate.
Faced with the latter, it is better to ignore the audience or pretend the audience is friendly during the early stages of writing. Not only can this overcome a block, it may lead to new thinking and knowledge. Writing to an audience has been characterized as the higher level cognitively, yet the ability to turn off the audience, to experiment with a more poetic form of language, should be seen as a higher level still. Kirsch, Gesa, and Duane H. Roen. A Sense of Audience in Written Communication.