SQR 6 Guillermo Cabrera/Raymundo Rivera

Guillermo Cabrera
ENG 1320/1301.161
Trang Phan
10/4/10
Summary 6 Guillermo Cabrera/Raymundo Rivera
Citation: Author(s): Peter Elbow “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience”. College English, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Jan., 1987), pp. 50-69
In this article, the author is trying to persuade the reader not to block the audience when speaking what we have writing in our paper. The author also explains that we either speak to two types of audience. The first one is enabling this audience is like talking to the perfect listener: we feel smart and come up with ideas we didn’t know we had. And then we have the inhibiting audience this are the people who always makes us feel dumb when we try to speak to them: we can’t find words or thoughts. The audience awareness disturbs or disrupts our writing and thinking without completely blocking it. In this article the author also talks about how writer base prose is better than reader based prose because many of us use writer base prose to block our audience from writing. The author also talks about two models discourse as communication and discourse as poesis or play. According to one model they learn discourse because they have an audience, and we need the other model to show us what is also true, namely that it is characteristic of the youngest children to use language in a non-social way.

Question: 6.The author analogizes experienced writers who think too much about their audiences
as a salesman trained to look the customer in the eye or an “ineffective actor whose
consciousness of self distracts us: he makes us too aware of his own awareness of us” (p.
54) and the other type of writing as “the performance of the actor who has managed to
stop attracting attention to her awareness of the audience watching her” (p. 54). Can you
interpret the author’s implication by these two analogies? How do you agree/disagree on his
point of view? Please explain.
Respond: The author implication by these analogies is that the first writing is about how the writer is trying to be professional towards the audience. While the other writing is just the writer being natural to his audience and also doesn’t care about the audience just writes whatever he feels and thinks. I agree about this point of view because I would like someone who is natural of what he is trying to write not just to be professional and try to be like a salesman. We also think that everybody has different points of views and work different and mainly think different about the audience.