SQR#6 Israel Flores, Edgar Ocana

Israel Flores, Edgar Ocana

ENG 1320/1301. 161

Instructor: Trang Phan

Date: 10/7/10

                            CLOSING MY EYES AS I SPEAK

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

Summary:

When I close my eyes to speak is a text that the author uses to refer shut out the audience.  This technique is used to transform you to a comfortable place.  When you write you don’t have an audience so you don’t worry about what you are writing about. When a writer has to speak in front of an audience you can get nervous and that is when you close your eyes to shut out the audience.  Audience awareness is hard for two reasons: if you find your audience to be intimidating such as student do to teacher that will put a lot of pressure on your writing, and second is when you write to someone you know.  When you write to someone you know you can become shy and timid so that can affect the way you write.  Some people believe that writer base prose is effective writing because you write what your thoughts and feeling without considering the audience. As opposed to reader base prose when target an audience and adjust their thoughts.  Whatever strategies you use in writing find a comfort zone where you find yourself blocking your audience and it won’t affect your writing abilities.

Question:

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 feels?

Response:

I agree on what Elbows said about an audience being a field force. Because many people have experienced it, but you have not noticed yet. It has happened to me many times in my life. Inhibiting audience is when let’s say you are trying to say a joke in front of people you don’t know. But you get this wired feeling and you start forgetting what to say. The audience becomes your fear, and without 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. Because you are thinking that maybe there are not going to laugh. The inviting audience is when you feel conferrable in front of the people maybe because you already know them or you’re not worried on what you are going to say. Maybe in front of your family because you already how you are.

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.

SQR 6 ROCIO RENDON, MAYRA HERNANDEZ

ROCIO RENDON, MAYRA HERNANDEZ

ENG. 1301/1320.161

Instructor: Trang Phan

October 6, 2010

CLOSING MY EYES AS I SPEAK

CITATION: Authors: Peter Elbow ,Source: College English Vol. 49. No. 1 (Jan. 1997). pp. 59-69

published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377789 Assessed: 20/08/2010 15:42

This article gave us a real 360 turn to our whole perception of what thinking what to write was all about.Not only because i felt this kind of reaction really familiar in the moment of writing. Writing is a whole new concept of what we think and feel combined making us close our eyes whenever we feel we need to connect with our internal thoughts,and most profound feelings. This kind of reaction happens very often making us get in problems sometimes when we want to avoid the crowd looking straight at us searching for an answer or just waiting for one. It is clear that this arguement for writing without audience awareness of some time, for example that we are reliable to neglect audience because we write in solitude, that young people often need more practice in taking into account the points of view different from their own and that students often have an improvised sense of writing as communication because they have only written in a shcool setting to teachers.

Question?

* What do you think when the author says " the effect of audience awareness is somewhere between the two extremes: the awareness disturbs or disrupts our writing and thinking without completely blocking it" (p.51-52) (by your own words) ?



* Response:


When you read this statement and analyzed it, you can know that this thought it is totally true, for example on the first extremes that is the when the audience disturbs you : because sometimes the audience distract you from what do you want to express or say and you star to writing or thinking wholly defensively for the fear about been criticism what the other people think or say of your writing or speech, but on the other hand when the audience did that you block your mind for completely , there is when you have to work harder to fix and move on with you writing , because when the audience is somehow confusing , the solution is fairly obvious, we can ignore that the audience during the stages of writing and direct our words only to ourselves or to no one in particular.

G. Berenice, Zaira SQR 6

G. Berenise De La Rosa, Zaira Montellano
ENG 1320/1301. 161
October 3, 2010
SQR 6

Citation: Peter Elbow. “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience”. College English, Vol. 49 No. 1(Jan., 1987), pp. 50-69.
This article is starting off as explaining on how the author deals with audience, feels about talking or reading to them and how he does it. Peter says that young people have different points of views since they have only written to their teachers. In the limited claim in explains what the audience means to the speaker, whether it is either inviting or enabling. When people think about the audience when they write, they think of more and better things to say. The effects of audience awareness is disturbs or disrupts and thinking without completely blocking it. On a more ambitious claim, ignoring an audience can lead to better writing. As they explained in Flowers article, write-based prose is better than reader-based prose. This section is mainly saying that a writer can do their writing better when they do not think about the reader and just concentrate on what they are writing. There is a third section which is two models of cognitive development which it emphasis on audience awareness probably derives from a cognitive development. As Flower relates writer-based prose to the inability to “decenter” which is characteristic of Piaget’s early stages of development and she relates reader-based prose to later more mature stages of development. What i think this article is mainly explaining is how a writer thinks about an audience and whether it is good to have them or better to just ignore them.

Question:
In page 53, the author concluded that “it’s often difficult to work out new meaning while thinking about readers”. Do you agree with this argument? Please explain.

Response:
We definitely agree, with the authors conclusion. We compared it to when you first assigned us an SQR, we had absoulutly no idea of what you expected from of. To be honest we really werent sure if to turn it in or not, I guess we were afraid to fail the assignment. We really spent hours think of what it was that you were going to look for when greading the whole SQR together. It wasn’t a new meaning, but it was a paper form that us both had never heard about nor ever worked with.

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.

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.

SQR5

Victoria Hernandez
Eng 1320/1301.161
Prof: Trang Phan
Date: 9/29/10



SQR 5
Citation: Linda Flower. “Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing”. College English, Vol. 41 No. 1(Sep., 1979), pp. 19-37.

The article “Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing”, written by Linda Flower is based on the simple question “if writing is expressing what you think then why is it so hard to write?” Linda explores the relationship between “Writer-Based Prose”, which is the most familiar writing style and can be recognized by the structure, function, and style. Reader-Based Prose is also the connection that the writer tries to make between the writing and the reader. The two main parts to answering these questions are called “Inner Speech and Egocentrism”. In a similar study done by Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky both observed a pattern in children which they later named “the mode of speech”. When children played they “carry on spirited elliptical monologues, which mean that they only talk about themselves. In speech what we say does not always come out the same on paper or make much since in a simpler phenomenon “inner speech”. Both child and elders share three common features: a highly ellipiptical, secondly, inner speech frequently deals in the sense of words and third egocentric/inner speech is the absence of logical and causal relations.
Question
How would you identify a Writer-Based Prose and a Reader-Based Prose?
Response
Writer-Based prose represents a major and familiar mode of expression which we all use from time to time or in other word you can identify by identified by features of structure, function, and style. But Reader-Based Prose are Reader-Based prose is a deliberate attempt to communicate something to the reader