ng the audience, the author is not only learning to address his readers, but he is also beginning to realize the relationship between the style of a piece of literature and the audience it attempts to reach.Probably one of the most effective pieces of advice offered by Elbow is, your teacher is a friend doing you a favornot an employee doing a duty. Much of the reason there is a problem between students and teachers to begin with is the fact that instructors feel insulted when authors turn in their final papers complete with abundant mistakes. A teacher could not be more offended. These educators are willing to give the student their expertise for free, and yet some students treat them as if they are responsible for cleaning up foolish errors that could very easily have been fixed. Elbow, a teacher himself, lists several pieces of common sense that he expects from his students. First, he expects that each paper be neat and as mistake-free as possible. Next, he asks that each paper be turned in on time. He goes on to mention how important it is to stick to the assignment and not rattle on about topics totally unrelated to that which you are supposed to be discussing. Although no student can be forced to follow each of these requests, if they are disregarded the teacher will undoubtedly become less motivated to try to understand an unclear passage or explain an error in the future. Much of Elbows advice is sensible and will help the student a great deal if applied correctly. However, several of his suggestions seem impractical. For example, Elbow recommends arranging an alternate assignment with the teacher. Teachers assign different projects because there is a certain skill they want to teach. Although an alternate assignment may indeed be able to offer the same type of learning, there is also the issue of fairness. Other students in the classroom may assume that the teacher is showing favoritism to another student. Instead of the studen...
