Day 5 blog

For tonight's blog, please read the following and then share your thoughts on Lanzbaum's position.

On Writing
by Leon Lanzbaum

All writing is a form of prayer.
-- John Keats

Graduate school: "We must write for our audience," says my rhetoric-and-writing professor. "We do not write for ourselves," he says. On this point, he is adamant, a rock. And on this same point, an ineffable tumult stirs within me as I sense most writers in academe submit to this professor's prescription, a prescription I'm not ready to swallow. As a student of the self-satisfied writers--Faulkner, Didion, White etc.--I learned the writer comes first. Not that writers shouldn't visualize their readers, but when purpose yields to audience, words lose their innocence. The writer holds back, does not give his or her all, or even worse, gives too much, and that's dishonest writing.

So what do we do as academic writers? Should we write for ourselves or write for an audience? I'll admit, I played the game. During my rhetoric-and-writing stint, I gave my professor what he wanted. I wrote for him! And my essays were the most antiseptic, fallow pieces I have ever written. But such is the nature of academic writing. It marks scholarly territory, territory devoid of the first person singular, territory that, for the most part, forces the writer to kill, or at least, hide his or her identity.

As someone who cares about writing, I loathe the writing of most rhetoric-and-writing departments. I abhore passive sentences and colorless verbs and narcoleptic nouns. I'm allergic to textbook writing and the convoluted, meandering language of lawyers and literary theorists. Writing is communication, the inside of one person speaking to another person. Writing is not a contest in whose word is bigger! I say that if we satisfy ourselves, an audience will find us. Read the words of Henry David Thoreau or Ernest Hemingway or Sandra Cisneros and you'll find writers who write for themselves yet still speak to the world.

But let’s face it, whether you're in English 101 or you write for a national magazine, you do write for some sort of audience--maybe your editor, maybe your readers, maybe your rhetoric-and-writing professor.

The Key: Respect the man or woman at the upper end of the keyboard, you!

Don't lose who you are. Lose yourself and you lose a unique voice, a voice that will never pass this way again.

So let's see what you can do to keep your unique voice, to write for yourself, yet still write for an audience.