SQR6

Cynthia Sanchez

Andrea Martinez

Trang Phan

                                                       "Closing My Eyes As I Speak"

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

“Closing My Eyes as I Speak” Peters Elbows briefly talks about how us writers sometimes do not really think when we are about to start writing. In other words that we practically write-base-prose. Elbows main point of view about us writing, write-base-prose is that he agrees with us and finds it as an easy way, because he thinks that every time the writer thinks of the audience we struggle to find the perfect word of fraise to sound perfect. Peter talks over two main things that audiences constantly seem to say. The first type is when audience gives good comments over the writers writing with a good tone. While the second type is when the audience just seem to be rude and make the writer feel dumb and unknowledgeable.

Q: In what way can audience awareness be helpful and hurtful when writing?

R: Audience awareness can be a very helpful source for writers while writing, for the fact of when we try to start to write a paper that we predict it will be understandable to them and well for us too. It can automatically be considered as a reader-based prose, because when us the writers have the audience in our mind when we write the paper it is known as readers-base-prose. However, it can be harmful, like if we think too much about our audience we just get confused and completely blank out or we just get stuck on the topic so we can’t think about what to really write. This is because we try too hard to satisfy our audience. For example: writer-based prose where we just don’t think about the audience, so that is what we as writers need to do, because they will give us a better paper. As for, reader-based prose it cannot be your own paper because the writer is just thinking of aiming directly to the point which it ends up being unsatisfied to the audience. The reason that that occurs is 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. We believe that the main format of readers-base-prose and writers-base-prose is that the writers need to know when and how to use those fromats.