SQR 6

Victoria Hernandez and Erick Gomez

Eng 1320/1301.161

Prof: Trang Phan

Date: 10/5/10

SQR6

Summary:

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 the article “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience”, written by Peter Elbow, he cover a quote “Very often people don't listen to you when you speak to them. It’s only that when you talk to yourself they prick their ears up”- John Ashbarry. If so, is the quote true, must we forget are audience to get our point across or is there a balance point where the speaker can connect to the audience and successful deliver his point of view. There are three types of audience and they are: inviting, enabling and powerfully inhibiting. An inviting audience will help the read communicate his idea clearly and give him there full attention, but an enabling audience might send the speaker some doubtful feelings towards his topic and might try to change his work on the spot, in doing so, change his point. The last type of audience is called inhibiting audience, yet, it goes back to inviting, although this time it has much more details. Inhibiting explains more to detail what the speaker is feeling when he gets a response from the audience. Therefore, the point is that the speaker depends on the audiences’ feedback.

Question:

The author says: “when attention to audience causes an overload, start out by ignoring them while you attend to your thinking; after you work out your thinking, turn your attention to audience” (p. 53). How could you know when it’s overloaded?


Response:

One knows when it is overloaded because it is the time that one gets too nervous. At this point one should not put too much attention to the audience and should start to relax. In other words, one should start to relax and think more on what they are trying to say rather than what the audience is thinking.