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.

Elbow opens his essay with an anecdote: when he can’t find words or thoughts in a social setting, he closes his eyes to ignore his audience. Often, when I am speaking or listening to people––whether it be professionally or casually––I find my eyes constantly wandering with the occasional glue of eye contact taking place just to reassure that I am in fact still listening. A lack of eye contact is often interpreted as a sign of insecurity, and while this might be true in some of my own cases, I find that I am also able to listen and piece a narrative together more clearly when I am not directly staring into a person’s soul. By shutting off or tuning out one sense another grows more strongly. My ears get bigger.

When a student is writing, his/her eyes are virtually closed to their audience––it is them, their computer screen, a deadline, and a grade. Elbow writes that “…we are liable to neglect audience because we write in solitude…young people often need more practice in taking into account points of view different from their own; and that students often have an improverished sense of writing as communication…” (50-51). Constantly, I stress to my class that what they write is part of a larger conversation. A lot of student often make pop culture references, or name check social applications, that would fall deaf upon any other generation. I try to help them understand that those they are conversing with sometimes need some explanatory detail.