As a writer, I’m suppose I’ve always been aware that at some point my work will be read by an audience. In a traditional school setting, that audience is usually a teacher or professor who has handed out an assignment that will be seen by them, and only them. Eventually, most people who write do so beyond the boundaries of the education system, and they then have to take into consideration that their audience is going to be wider than just a teacher or a professor. Most good writing teachers will recognize this, and provide opportunities for students to practice and master writing for different audiences. This is a process that I’ve seen happen for many years now, both as a student, and as a writing TA, but I had never considered when the audience should be considered in any given project.
In last week’s class, we spoke about the intricacies of considering audience in our writing, and I’d previously assumed that I just instinctively knew the “right” time to begin focusing on the needs of my audience when I sat down to write. I figured that I’d been aware of who would be reading my work the entire time, and had written with them in mind from the first sentence. Then I read Peter Elbow’s article, “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” In this article, Elbow claims that in the first few drafts of a project, writers should ignore the audience, and simply focus on getting all of their thoughts down on paper. This was the moment when I realized that I’ve spent much of my writing career doing just that.
When I begin any kind of writing project, I always have a notebook with me that I use to write down all of my thoughts. This is a kind of free-writing strategy that I’ve found helpful over the years. The practice of getting all of my thoughts on the page before I actually begin the paper has become such a part of my process that I no longer think about it. In reality, what I’m producing here is draft 1 (and sometimes 2, 3, and 4). This is the space where I find myself ignoring the audience.
In our class discussion, it was clear that many people find writing for a particular audience to be restricting. Some even found it to be the cause of great anxiety, especially if they’re writing for certain professors, or if they’ve got negative voices in their heads while they’re trying to write. In these cases, ignoring the audience becomes a way to open the floodgates and allow writing to actually happen. While this is easier said than done, sometimes just acknowledging that these roadblocks can make it easier to navigate around them.
Writing TA/Peer Leader 