Response #5, "Peter Elbow, Heretic"

DFaye Anderson

Professor B. Gleason

ENGL 0862

Dec. 2014

“Peter Elbow, Heretic”

            Peter Elbow is a blasphemer! Take him and staple him to the smart board, as a reminder to our student writers – you must always, as you write, keep your audience in mind. It is for them that you produce prose.

            Reader-based writing is what we teach our acolytes. Keeping audience foremost in your thinking while writing, it had been believed, led to direct, effective communication. Readers are not in our heads. Their entrée to our thinking is through written word, so we must write with that guidepost. Peter Elbow advocates instead for a writer-based writing, where the audience takes a backseat, at least initially, when we write. He believes that audience awareness, early in the writing process, can actually impede our efforts at communicating, causing students to freeze up, and rather than express their authentic selves, to produce prose that they think will please the reader, who, too often, is only the teacher. Elbow doesn’t freeze out the audience entirely. Audience does have a place in his thinking. He simply believes that “ignoring the audience can lead to worse drafts, but better revisions.” (172)

            In the article “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring the Audience,” peter Elbow discusses two contrary theories of cognitive development. The Piagetian model is the “inside out” view. Humans begin life self-centered and, learn to decenter and come to appreciate the world outside of themselves as they grow older.

 

The opposing view, represented by Vygotsky, says we develop our cognitive capacity through social interaction, and then later learn to perform them in private.” (179)

            Thankfully, I’ve learned, for my own writing, the efficacy of keeping a foot in both camps. I am always aware, and teach my students to remember that the reader needs them as a guide into their meaning. Whatever you want them to know, or feel, must first be written down. But I also am aware of the paralysis that can creep in if you are always aware of someone perched on your shoulder and you think that they are judging and evaluating your writing.

 I can’t say I’ve always been conscious that it could hinder my students though.  I have been in the “try harder” camp with them. I’ve seldom used free writes, but I can see how that can liberate them up to express their real selves. They can thereafter take the best of the free write, and in revision, begin to address the needs of the audience. Peter Elbow makes good sense, even if he goes against the grain.

Works Cited

Elbow, Peter, “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” Ed.  T. R. Johnson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.172-194.Print.