Sebastian Salinas, David Munoz

Sebastian Salinas Trevino & David Munoz
ENG 1320/1301.161
Instructor: Trang Phan
Date: 0/10/2010

Closing my eyes as I speak

Peter Elbow. “Closing my eyes as I speak: an argument for audience”. College English, vol. 49 No.1(Jan. 1987) pp. 50-69

Summary:

When we are speaking is very different than when we are writing. When we are speaking we are in front of people and we can make mistakes and we cannot fix them, that is the big difference about speaking and writing. When we are writing we don’t need to see the people who is reading, we don’t even need to know them; when we write and we make a mistake it is as easy as erase it and nobody is going to know it because we can fix the mistakes before we publish the article, but when we are speaking everybody who is listen carefully will know that you made a mistake, and we can do more things like speak very loud, feel scary, feel shy, things like that and when we are writing we don’t feel that things. It is easier to the people to express better  writing than speaking, because when we write we have more time to think an d put better ideas in the paper, and when we are speaking we cannot do that. That’s why the author said “closing my eyes as I speak” because it is like you are alone and when we write we are alone, that’s why it is better to write than speak.

Question:

1. Elbow argues that an audience is a field of force. What do you understand about this? Have you ever experienced inviting/enabling audiences or inhibiting ones for your writing? Can you explain how it feel?

Response:

I agree with he, it is like a field of force because when you are speaking in front of an audience you can feel shy, scary, nervious, and you cant say all you want to say because you feel nervious. It feels very bad because you are thinking in other things. When is inviting you feel more comfortable with them and when they are inhibiting you fell very bad and you feel like you are not doing a good job or something.

The audience becomes your fear, and with out even noticing this can stop your brain from processing the information you already know, that’s when you say my head or my mind went blind, everything you know can be blocked from your mind so the knowledge you knew is temporarily out of service.

This the only explanation that I can as a person describe, this is complex only people

who have been exposed of being heard from and audience can know exactly how it

feels, it’s a matter of having the experience.