The rhetorical approach, if I have this right, must take into account the audience. That’s kind of imbedded, right? So what to make of the correlation between the rhetorical approach and an approach that, right out of the gate, speaks to “an instinctive attempt to blot out awareness of audience”?
I think it’s fair to say that the title of Elbow’s piece, “Closing My Eyes As I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience,” is more bark than bite. By this I mean that his essay does quite a bit to reinforce the rhetorical approach to student, professional, and academic writing, mainly in terms of revision—an element I probably latched onto simply because it is a practice with which I have plenty of experience.
“In short, ignoring audience can lead to worse drafts but better revisions.”
I would argue that the act of revision is, among other things, the act of becoming and, as a result, paying attention to audience. Elbow goes on in the section he titles “A More Ambitious Claim”
“To celebrate writer-based prose is to risk the charge of romanticism: just warbling one’s woodnotes wild. But my position also contains the austere classic view that we must nevertheless revise with conscious awareness of audience…”
Is revision not part of the argumentative process? If what we’re talking about is composition, then we must consider the revision process an element of the writing process, as a part of the composition whole. If a part of the whole includes attention to audience, then I would argue that Elbow’s approach engages with the rhetorical approach, at a bare minimum, in its attention to the revision process, even if the audience for revision purposes remains the writer as self. In terms of technique, the approach seems very much the same.