SQR6

Roxanna Diaz
Jessica Mendoza
Eng 1302/1320.158
Trang Phan
October 4, 2010
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
SUMMARY:
In this article Peter Elbow, the author, starts telling the reader about how it is very rude when a person closes their eyes to think about what they are going to say. The reason that a person does this is because they want to clear their mind and be able to say the right thing to the audience. In order for them to do that they close their eyes even though it might look rude to a person, but this action might be good for a writer. Elbow later tells us how sometimes it is better for the writer to use writer-based prose than reader-based prose because when the writer is thinking too much about the audience they just get to confused when writing. This is because if we know who we are writing for we just go blank and cannot write any more. So in order to do better the author just has to be able to block their audience until they get their train of thought back on the subject and then get back to reader-based prose. There is also the two cognitive models of development that author name which are Piagentian and Vygotskian. Piagentian is when the writer “learn to enter into viewpoints other than our own”, the Vygotskian is when the writer “learn to produce good thinking and discourse while alone”. By the writing being about to do this they are showing that they have been about to obtain a higher skill.
Question: In what way can the audience awareness be helpful and harmful when writing?
Response:
Audience awareness can be helpful while writing because we try to write a paper that would be understandable to them. This can be considering reader-based prose because we have the audience in our mind when we write the paper. The way it can be harmful is that we think too much about our audience that we get stuck in the topic and do not know what to write. This is because we try too hard to satisfy our audience that we get ourselves confused and at the end we don’t get our point to the reader. Just like in writer-based prose where we do not think about the audience that is what we as writer need to do sometime because they will give us a better paper. In the other hand when writing reader-based prose it tends not to be your own paper because the writer is going straight to the point in which ends up being somewhat boring to the reader. They do this because they have too much audience awareness. In our opinion we think audience awareness can be both helpful and harmful but in order to get a good paper we have to be able to use reader-based prose and writer-based prose. But the key about using both of them is knowing which one to used and at what time to use it.