SQR #6 Miguel A. Garcia, Jose Mata

Student’s name: Jose Mata, Miguel A. Garcia
ENG 1320/1301. 161
Instructor’s name: Trang Phan
Date: September 29, 2010

Closing my eyes as I speak: an argument for ignoring audience

To close the eyes as speak can be useful to erase the awareness of audience, when a speaker or writer needs all his concentration to figure out or to express what they want to say. Even though ignoring audience usually leads us to a weak writing at first this weak writing can help us in the end for a better writing than we would have written if we have readers in mind from the beginning. Limited Claim, It is not that writers should never think about their audience it is a question of when. An audience is a field of force. The closer we get, the more we think about the readers. The practical question, then, is always whether a particular audience functions as a helpful field of force or one that confuses or inhibits us. Some audiences, for example, are inviting or enabling. When we think about them as we write, we think of more and better things to say-and what we think somehow arrives more coherently structured than usual. Other audiences, however, are powerfully inhibiting-so much so, in certain Cases, that awareness of them as we write blocks writing altogether. There are certain people who always make us feel dumb when we try to speak to them: we can't find words or thoughts. As soon as we get out of their presence, all the things we wanted to say pop back into our minds. The effect of the audience is somewhere between the two extremes disturbs or disrupts or writing. When we have to write to readers whom we have a complicated relationship we always feel shy or scared, when students have to write to readers they have not met they often find nothing to say except repeated clichés they don’t even  believe.

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

Q.-How thinking in audience can affect our writing?

There are several types of audience. There are some who make you feel more comfortable with, this means that ideas, thoughts and sentences comes easily to your mind thus those kind of audiences help you to do a better job clearer and well structured. In the other hand, there are some audiences that may inhibit us and turn our writing into bad writing; someone who make us feel uncomfortable like our manager or even our parents. Also there are some audiences that we do not know and we often find nothing to say except repeated clichés they do not believe.