Peter Elbow states that in order to write effectively, one must ignore audience, or at least for the majority of the writing. When I first started to read this, I couldn’t imagine how he could be right. In academic writing, one must always know the audience and whom one is talking to, whether it’s a friend, colleague, or professor. Audience is a crucial part of writing, something I have told my students over and over again. A student can’t write a formal academic paper to a friend and expect it to be polished and professional. It just will not happen.
I then started thinking about my creative writing side, however, and realized that Elbow is on to something I had never really thought of before. Writing, for me, is stream-of-consciousness and I write what I think. I write everything, even if it doesn’t make sense. But the audience is just me so it’s ok. Elbow states, “By doing this exploratory ‘swamp work’ in conditions of safety, we can often coax our thinking through a process of new discovery and development. In this way we can end up with something better than we could have produced if we’d tried to write to our audience all along.” Perhaps Elbow’s theory can work in some types of creative writing but not formal, academic papers. I’m going to explore this idea more.