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Alva Nidia Huerta

Lucero Chinchurreta

Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience

Summary:

This article is about writers not to undermine the benefits of writing with audience, but to benefit from the ignorance of audience. In the article Elbow states that even though the audience helps the students feel smart and help enable their writing, it’s more ordinary of audiences who intimidate students, audiences that block and disrupt the writer from composing. Teachers need to help the students in recognizing what audience awareness is and for them to find a way to ignore the audiences as they compose.

Elbow claims ignoring the audience in early stages of the writing process can ultimately result in better writing, this helps prevent the writer’s blockage and the irritation towards their writing. Yet the writing can lead to writer-based prose instead of reader-based prose, writing writer-based prose is more natural. But it can also be odd, and writers should allow for the importance of revising with the audience in mind.

In the article the role of audience awareness is shown in two models of cognitive development, the Piagetian and the Vygotskian. The Piagetian model claims that language begins as a private act and as we mature, we learn to become more social. It claims that underdeveloped writing is caused by the inability to meet the needs of the audience. The solution for such writing, says the Piagetians, is to "think more about the audience." The Vygotskian model, on the other hand, states that language begins as a social act and as we mature, we learn to better hear our own voices for ourselves. Underdeveloped writing in this model happens when writers haven't taken the time to hear that voice. The solution for Vygotskians is for the author to develop ideas more fully for themselves.

Peter Elbow. “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience”. College English, Vol. 49, No. 1(Jan., 1987), pp 50-69

Question:

Have you ever experience inviting/enabling audiences or inhibiting ones for you writing? Can you explain how it felt?

Response:

After reading the article “Closing My Eyes” by Peter Elbow we agree that for some people audience awareness is experience in a different way for some when they are expose to audience awareness as an inviting/enabling audience they feel comfortable writing in front or with an audience but for other audience awareness can be inhibiting which means that they do not like for other to say or see their audience they decide to close their eyes and block their audience completely. For example for us we tend or at some point we used to be inhibiting type of audience because when will get intimidated by the audience to the point where we will get nervous, we wouldn’t write or our thoughts and ideas would go away we would just feel dumps and we would do much will in the other hand as soon the person left or we would block our audience we would start writing with no problem our ideas would be better and we would end up with a complete draft. But as time pass we have learned to work with an audiences without feeling dumb, get distracted and blank out.