Posted by Glenn Jackson at Wednesday, October 12, 2011 8:46:39 PM EDT
My audience becomes angry because I have addressed last week’s reading. The masses throng against me, shouting encore, reprise, remixest thou a more appropriate entry. My audience prefers a shower to a bath, and a hot tub to the both. My audience drives only Audis. My audience is getting sleepy.
Peter Elbow argues in “Closing My Eyes as I Speak[…]” that considering always the audience may not fix a writer’s writers’ block, nor incept better writing, nor enable a truer voice. I’d say that’s good news, since teaching audience so often spurs an interlanguage which proves worse than a writer’s already-always-tentative style. Considering audience supposedly improves the connection between audience and author, but Elbow knows that it often results in ignoring the speaker. Starting on the first day of a composition course, the instructor figures out a way to break into that “stilted,k overly careful style or voice” (174) that a power structure and mandatory writing produce in all writers, particularly freshmen.
I want to say that I like Linda Flower’s “steps in the writing process” that Elbow outlines (175): when the sense of audience is oppressive, ignore the audience while figuring out how to think, then head back to the audience. This step, I think, is when more motivated scholars send notes to professors. Someone shot me a note last night: how does proclamation get in the way of Emerson’s ideas? I’ll dig on Elbow for a second and say that this process of Flower’s probably works better than writing in invisible ink, and I’ll bet it “produces better writing,” too, which phrase I’ve seen in Elbow several times. It does not account for final drafts often including “passages of freewriting” that are strong. In addition to the great phrases Elbow uses, such as “swamp work” and “desert island discourse,” several moments protrude from this piece. He compares a writer to a “salesman trained to look the customer in the eye and to think at all times about the characteristics of the ‘target audience.’” Walking around outside the POT on Monday, I saw a well-dressed and handsome fellow whom I immediately identified as a U.S. recruiter conferencing with a student by the classroom building. The recruiter said,
“So, do you think this is something you might be interested in doing? I mean, I’m not pushing you, you don’t have to sign up, but—”
And the other young man responded quietly.
The recruiter put his back back in the back of the chair.
“What are you doing Wednesday night?”
I considered the sales technique. It ran from reasonable deference to a nosy affrontery in one exchange. I didn’t stay long enough to hear whether the student bought into it. Buddy of Buddy’s Carpet Barn on Route 4 outside of Cincinnati used to say on his commercials, “I don’t care about making money, I just love to sell carpet.”
The succinct summary and dialectic Elbow uses to oppose two psychological models is fantastic.
Piagetians: “’The egocentric little critters, we’ve got to /socialize/ ‘em! Ergo, make them think about audience when they write!’”
Vygotskians: “’No wonder they’re having trouble writing. They’ve been bamboozled by the Piagetian heresy. They think they’re solitary individuals with private selves when really they’re just congeries of voices that derive from their discourse community.’” (180)
Not to ruin it, I just really wanted to see how that would look as a Ciceronian dialogue.
Elbow believes we should not effectively agree that budding writers are either dumb (but not stupid) or retarded (but not dumb). Why not just call them “poor writers,” he asks (182). My answer is simple. I can’t call them poor writers because sometimes they are not. Sometimes I write a good song, and other times I write a bad song, and most times I don’t have time to write. My students sometimes write well, given good assignments, and sometimes they write well, given topics that pique their interest, and sometimes they write well, given many chances to make their own connections and choose their own topics. What Elbow is really good at, according to me, is the following:
1) Comparing new students to professional academics, as he does in “Closing My Eyes…” and “Comparing Academic Discourse.
2) Breaking down that shy and probing and tentative and quelled tone from all writers.
3) Turning on the tap. Making writing better because he encourages students (and us) and professors (and readers) to write more.
In an earlier class and the last time I wrote here, I thought-out-loud that there is always more than just one audience—we write directly for a varied audience, plus someone who is surveying our communication, plus the web administrator who sees our emails for our protection, plus Google whose Checkout will soon own my credit, plus the Panopticon, plus our own edification/mortification. Elbow argues here against the /audience of self/ and, he paraphrases, “standing outside and reading our own utterance as audience…” (187). He believes that we write not “to the self” but “for the sake of self.” I concur. The creative writing teacher, or worse yet, the composition teacher, is the hobo-guru-sherpa who stands partly obstructing this process, not between the writer and the audience but between the Writing To self and Writing For self. Is it possible to teach not writing but “getting out of the way”? By popular demand, I begin assigning writing by telling not just the intended audience, but the clear-and-present-danger-audience: whether I will be asking students to share or edit This later, whether I will see it (ever), and the amount of time allotted for constructing the audience / producing the text / locating the writer.
Unrelated note: I would really like to know how to make peer editing work better for inexperienced writers, either in theory or in practice, since I know this is not a pedagogy but a theory course. If I have the theory, I can work out some “classroom” from it. The last good article I read about that was Flower’s and Hayes’.
Peter Elbow argues in “Closing My Eyes as I Speak[…]” that considering always the audience may not fix a writer’s writers’ block, nor incept better writing, nor enable a truer voice. I’d say that’s good news, since teaching audience so often spurs an interlanguage which proves worse than a writer’s already-always-tentative style. Considering audience supposedly improves the connection between audience and author, but Elbow knows that it often results in ignoring the speaker. Starting on the first day of a composition course, the instructor figures out a way to break into that “stilted,k overly careful style or voice” (174) that a power structure and mandatory writing produce in all writers, particularly freshmen.
I want to say that I like Linda Flower’s “steps in the writing process” that Elbow outlines (175): when the sense of audience is oppressive, ignore the audience while figuring out how to think, then head back to the audience. This step, I think, is when more motivated scholars send notes to professors. Someone shot me a note last night: how does proclamation get in the way of Emerson’s ideas? I’ll dig on Elbow for a second and say that this process of Flower’s probably works better than writing in invisible ink, and I’ll bet it “produces better writing,” too, which phrase I’ve seen in Elbow several times. It does not account for final drafts often including “passages of freewriting” that are strong. In addition to the great phrases Elbow uses, such as “swamp work” and “desert island discourse,” several moments protrude from this piece. He compares a writer to a “salesman trained to look the customer in the eye and to think at all times about the characteristics of the ‘target audience.’” Walking around outside the POT on Monday, I saw a well-dressed and handsome fellow whom I immediately identified as a U.S. recruiter conferencing with a student by the classroom building. The recruiter said,
“So, do you think this is something you might be interested in doing? I mean, I’m not pushing you, you don’t have to sign up, but—”
And the other young man responded quietly.
The recruiter put his back back in the back of the chair.
“What are you doing Wednesday night?”
I considered the sales technique. It ran from reasonable deference to a nosy affrontery in one exchange. I didn’t stay long enough to hear whether the student bought into it. Buddy of Buddy’s Carpet Barn on Route 4 outside of Cincinnati used to say on his commercials, “I don’t care about making money, I just love to sell carpet.”
The succinct summary and dialectic Elbow uses to oppose two psychological models is fantastic.
Piagetians: “’The egocentric little critters, we’ve got to /socialize/ ‘em! Ergo, make them think about audience when they write!’”
Vygotskians: “’No wonder they’re having trouble writing. They’ve been bamboozled by the Piagetian heresy. They think they’re solitary individuals with private selves when really they’re just congeries of voices that derive from their discourse community.’” (180)
Not to ruin it, I just really wanted to see how that would look as a Ciceronian dialogue.
Elbow believes we should not effectively agree that budding writers are either dumb (but not stupid) or retarded (but not dumb). Why not just call them “poor writers,” he asks (182). My answer is simple. I can’t call them poor writers because sometimes they are not. Sometimes I write a good song, and other times I write a bad song, and most times I don’t have time to write. My students sometimes write well, given good assignments, and sometimes they write well, given topics that pique their interest, and sometimes they write well, given many chances to make their own connections and choose their own topics. What Elbow is really good at, according to me, is the following:
1) Comparing new students to professional academics, as he does in “Closing My Eyes…” and “Comparing Academic Discourse.
2) Breaking down that shy and probing and tentative and quelled tone from all writers.
3) Turning on the tap. Making writing better because he encourages students (and us) and professors (and readers) to write more.
In an earlier class and the last time I wrote here, I thought-out-loud that there is always more than just one audience—we write directly for a varied audience, plus someone who is surveying our communication, plus the web administrator who sees our emails for our protection, plus Google whose Checkout will soon own my credit, plus the Panopticon, plus our own edification/mortification. Elbow argues here against the /audience of self/ and, he paraphrases, “standing outside and reading our own utterance as audience…” (187). He believes that we write not “to the self” but “for the sake of self.” I concur. The creative writing teacher, or worse yet, the composition teacher, is the hobo-guru-sherpa who stands partly obstructing this process, not between the writer and the audience but between the Writing To self and Writing For self. Is it possible to teach not writing but “getting out of the way”? By popular demand, I begin assigning writing by telling not just the intended audience, but the clear-and-present-danger-audience: whether I will be asking students to share or edit This later, whether I will see it (ever), and the amount of time allotted for constructing the audience / producing the text / locating the writer.
Unrelated note: I would really like to know how to make peer editing work better for inexperienced writers, either in theory or in practice, since I know this is not a pedagogy but a theory course. If I have the theory, I can work out some “classroom” from it. The last good article I read about that was Flower’s and Hayes’.
