Peter Elbow talks about private language as a way in which children can “[build] sandcastles or draw pictures” (58), either for themselves or to be shown to others. The relation between these two ideas, private work versus public work, seems to be extremely important. While many of my students are used to writing for a grade, few of them seem to actually write to develop or express ideas. In many of my students papers, they seem to be unwilling to take the risk of letting me view their “experience[s] and material[s]” (57).

I believe this to be because, while getting a low grade is unpleasant, getting a “subpar” grade on something that you care about is truly painful. There is a difference between getting an “F” on a generic paper about technology and getting an “F” on a paper dealing with something you truly love. However, because there is nothing of themselves in the paper, or because they honestly don’t believe what it is that they’re writing, the generic technology paper lacks purpose.

Instead of trying to convince their reader, they present information in a way that, while technically completing the task, makes me wonder: “What the hell is the point of this?!”

The worst attempts happen when it is obvious that the student doesn’t even believe what he/she is writing. As they are unable to “initiate” the argument, they are forced to “reply” to general classroom discussions instead of focusing on how to develop and “sustain” (57) their argument. When this happens, but I am able to see tiny glimpses of the student’s inner-feelings peeking through generic support, I want to hurl my laptop across my room. It shows that there is something there. It acknowledges the fact that the student is not hopeless. However, it shows the problem that comes with the teacher-student power dynamic.

The student is scared of me. I am not a friend. I am the enemy. I offer nothing except big words meant to confuse. I offer crushed dreams. So instead of presenting themselves to me, they present what they believe it is that I want to see.

Damn it, all I want to see is an essay that contains a hint of who they are. And a Works Cited page.

I may have to settle for only the Works Cited page.

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.

After going through Peter Elbow’s “Being a Writer vs Being an Academic,” I find myself disliking the approach and distinction that Elbow highlights. While I can agree that not all writers wish to pursue traditional academic studies and that not all academics wish to write about everything, inserting this distinction into a freshman writing class seems a bit dangerous. Are not the students there to learn how to write in an academic setting? First year writing classes are, unless I’m mistaken, there to help students learn to the write the types of papers that their higher level classes’ professors expect them to write. Taking away the academic aspects of writing in the classroom would leave students vulnerable in their higher level classes. I do like his idea of putting his students’ papers in conversation with each other; however, I find that being in touch with others, be they scientists, academics, politicians, etc., to be a useful skill because that type of writing and research is prevalent throughout many jobs. Elbow mentions the “self-absorbed” writer being a positive thing, but advocating for a self-centered idea, while it has the possibility to urge students forward, ultimately does more harm than good when they leave that class, at least in my opinion. With all the above being said, I find myself thinking about the nature of the first year writing class and whether or not its purpose is to prepare students for academic writing or to teach them how to write, in the sense that Elbow uses.

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.