SQR 6

Eloy Gonzalez
Arturo De La Torre
English 2313/1301.158
Trang Phan
10/5/10
Closing My Eyes As I Speak; An Argument for Ignoring Audience
Peter Elbow. “Closing My Eyes As I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience”. College English, Vol.49, No.1 (Jan., 1987), pp.50-69
S: Closing my eyes as I speak is mainly about helping one to become a better writer by teaching them to ignore their audience when the time is right. The author contradicts what the author Linda Flower says about Reader-Based Prose being better than Writer-Based Prose. Writer-Based prose as in many cased even when speaking can help the writer have more sense of what they want to write. Some audiences become hard to speak or write to when your are trying directly saying something but if you just say thoughts you are certainly expressing yourself to what you really want to say. The author gives another point of view on Reader-Based Prose and Writer-Based Prose giving more sense to the Writer-Based Prose. One main factor could be when writing discourse, as in communication or as in a play or poesies. Teacher role changes when criticism because they are no longer a teacher but an audience when this writing is being looked at. The author finishes by giving the different types of writing which are the writing task, actual reader, ones’ own temperament, “audience in-the-head”, double audience, and teacher in consideration for the best writing. When the situation gets rough sometimes it may help to putting readers out of mind and thinking of no audience, to self as a Writer-Based prose, when revising its always good to revise with an audience in mind that way your writing can make sense to whom you are speaking to.
Q: How is audience awareness related to Writer-Based Prose and Reader-Based?
R: Writer-Based prose is writing without thinking of your audience and writing to yourself and for yourself. Reader-Based prose is writing with an audience in mind and basing your conclusions and opinions on what the audience might be interested in. The author mentioned that in order for audience to understand you have to mention what your ideas are and organize them in a way for your audience to understand. In order to do that you would use both the Writer-Based prose to formulate ideas and freely write them down and then Reader-Based prose by organizing the ideas so the audience can get a sense of what you are trying to say and can agree or criticize. For example, in a research you can start of as Writer-Based prose by getting your ideas and writing them down. Then you can use Reader-Based prose to organize those ideas so the audience can understand them. Audience awareness is a combination of composing Writer-Based prose ideas and Read-Based prose. Audience awareness helps you know when the time is right to ignore the audience out of mind and when to emphasize audience awareness just like switching from Writer-Based prose to Reader Based prose.