Julia Serrato

Alexander Swiger
English 1302
01/28/2020
SAR 1

Reading Elbow’s essay I learned to see things from a new perspective. The first paragraph

itself explains the importance of being able to ignore an audience, further down the essay it

explains how “If people ignored the audience from the beginning their writing would start off

okay and later transition to better writing rather than worse to worse” (Elbow pg51). This

perspective makes perfect sense, when a writer thinks for himself or herself and the writing

comes from within they could more than likely write so much more rather than being stuck

thinking about the audience. Now, the text also makes it very clear when it states “It’s not that

the writers should never think about their audience, it’s a question of when” (Elbow pg51).

There are certain topics that an audience could be avoided and still be successful but just likes

there’s a few, there is also topics that should not be avoided so the message can clearly be

delivered. Learning about this idea to expand writing will most definitely help me a lot. Implying

it in areas that I’m aware I need more help in and doing it from within will 9/10 make a huge

difference in my writings. It’s like treating it like a personal diary that later on will just need

some revising.

When I was in high school I took a speech and debate class, one experience I can relate to

this was when I was delivering my speech and my teacher commented that my speech was good,

but it could be great. He said my speech was mostly facts rather than me going into debt and

explaining why. This essay by Elbow is exactly what I had to input in my writing, I had to ignore

the audience and truly spoke about why I felt a certain way for the topic. My speech would have

been delivered successfully. This essay has challenged me as a reader because I was reading

about a topic that had never crossed my mind before but should have a long time ago. I will
Julia Serrato
Alexander Swiger
English 1302
01/28/2020
definitely input this in my strategies and force myself to go off from this. Knowing I am

expected to lead off this is better, I now know what is expected.