Peter Elbow on the Process of Writing
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Peter Elbow in his essay "Closing My Eyes as I Speak" describes an aspect of the process of writing and demonstrates how a writer can improve his or her work by writing for themselves rather than for an audience. Begin with an analogy to public speaking, where the speaker may close his or her eyes in order to concentrate more fully to find the right word. The writer often needs to do the same thing, to push away the audience while struggling to figure something out and to improve the writing. Elbow states that there are good reasons for writing with an audience in mind and also good reasons for writing without an awareness of the audience. To understand how to make this work in the writing process, it is necessary to understand the advantages of pushing away the audience and some of the ways of accomplishing it.Elbow offers a cogent quote from John Ashbery: "Very often people don't listen to you when you speak to them. It's only when you talk to yourself that they prick up their ears" (247). This quote offers a guide for the writer. The audience is often better served when the writer forgets about them during the writing process. Elbow agrees with other commentators that ignoring the audience will usually lead to weak writing at first--Linda Flower calls this "writer-based prose." In the end, though, this weak writing can lead to better writing. It is not whether the writer should think of the audience but when the writer should do so. Elbow calls the audience
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how the effect of audience awareness on voice is often paradoxical. We achieve a voice by speaking out to the audience, but often we cannot do this until we ignore the audience and say what we have to say in the way that suits us best, not in the way we think the audience would like to hear. We please by not trying to please. In Elbow's conception, the charge that this approach might be called romanticism--"just warbling one's woodnotes wild," as he says (252)--is tempered by the classic view that the writer must revise with a conscious awareness of the audience.
Elbow believes that the current emphasis on audience awareness derives from a model of cognitive development that should be questioned. This model holds that it is more mature to direct words to readers than to direct them to yourself. Writer-based prose is related to the inability to "decenter," characteristic of Piaget's early stages of child development. While this may be correct--children do decenter as they develop--we should also consider the contrary model affirming that the ability to turn off audience awareness is itself a "higher" skill, particularly when such awareness confuses thinking or blocks discourse. This alternate view is related to a model offe
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Some common words found in the essay are:
John Ashbery, Essentially Elbow, Eyes Speak, writing process, own voice, audience mind, past audiences, Peter Elbow, audience awareness, model holds, ignore audience, cognitive development, awareness audience, private dimension, learn aware audience, found own voice, audience mind times, discourse language cognition, writing process understand,
Approximate Word count = 1989
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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