Elbow & Ong: Audience

I found myself agreeing with many of the things Elbow had to say in his essay. Often when we concentrate too much on addressing our language in our writing toward a certain audience in our heads (or an audience who we know will eventually be reading our work, like a teacher), it becomes difficult to work out what we are trying to say because our concentration is not in the right place. As Elbow says, "[Writers] are actung too much like a salesman trained to look the customer in the eye and to think at all times about the characteristics or the 'target audience.'" Elbow argues that, at least in the initial draft, writers should forget about who they're writing to, and instead write for themselves. His theory is that the best way to figure our what we're trying to say is to forget about how readers will receive the writing; otherwise, the writing has a tendency to become thin and contrived. The writing becomes much more genuine when the writer doesn't settle for taking what they believe to be the reader's point of view, but rather attempts to make the reader see from their perspective.

The paradoxes that Elbow mentions when it comes to teaching writing in school were intriguing. While it is important for students to "try harder" in their writing, they also must "just relax" and forget about who they're writing for. This paradox reminded me of the girl who claimed to have nothing to say about Catcher and the Rye in Mirskin's essay. Students often mistake not being able to sustain private discourse by forgetting about audience with having nothing to say.

Ong takes a slightly different view about how writers should consider their audience. He claims that the best way for writers to succeed is for them to imagine an audience that has adapted to their writing style, as opposed to thinking about the people who will actually be reading their work. Ong also takes on the idea that the readers must take an active role in becoming the type of audience that the writer is writing for. Readers must learn "how to conform themselves to the projections of the writers they read, or at least how to operate in terms of these projections" (12).

Overall, I think both Elbow and Ong have some original ideas that break away from one of the golden rules that writers have always been taught: to think about the audience to whom they are writing. By freeing ourselves from the mental constrains of writing to anyone in particular, we allow our best ideas to come forth without any regard for how anyone else might receive the information.