You’re a college student. Your professor assigns a research paper and generously points you in the direction of scholarly sources relating to the topic you are tasked with writing about. After a few hours of staring at your computer screen and mindlessly scrolling over article after article, you’ve found the winners. You comb through each source, jotting down key points from each. You have everything you need. When it comes time to write the paper itself, you flawlessly present what you’ve learned from your research. Every fact that you wrote down in your notes is used in the paper, all culminating in the ultimate truth, the conclusion drawn from the stances of your source texts.
Something seems a bit off, right? There’s something missing in the method of how this paper came to be. Sure, your sources are cited, and you have evidence to back up your claims, but they aren’t really your claims, are they? By deferring to “the text”, you have written a paper without any authority of your own.
Janet and Roger
To write with authority means including yourself in the conversation. The difference in a paper written with authority versus one written without is plainly apparent, but only once you’ve seen examples of both side by side. This is exactly what Ann. M. Penrose and Cheryl Geisler do in “Reading and Writing without Authority” by using the characters of Janet and Roger. Both characters are given the topic of paternalism, a term that they must define and explore within their papers. Just from the sample introductions provided, it is clear that Janet and Roger have taken very different approaches to their papers. As Penrose and Geisler state, “Janet’s text views the definition and justificatory conditions as established truths, while Roger introduces them as matters yet to be resolved”. In this way, Janet writes her paper as an outsider on the topic, viewing her sources as definitive truth, rather than openings for further discussion like Roger does. Janet’s paper is a report, Roger’s is a debate.
Authority in Roger’s Paper
Roger shows his authority in several ways in his paper. For one, he treats his sources not as unchallengeable truths, but as pieces whose authors he can engage in debate with on an even level. He has done his research, so he has the knowledge to challenge ideas put forth by these authors and form his own feelings on the topic. This is something Janet does not do in her paper. In Penrose and Geisler’s own words, she “exclud[es] herself from the conversation, Janet deleted from her draft a pair of terms she had developed to help explain a complex distinction proposed by one of the authors…”. She is viewing her sources as the authority on the topic, rather than understanding that she is also now part of the conversation, and thus is allowed to (and even expected to) challenge those so called “truths” presented by others before her.
Even just from reading the introductions of Janet and Roger’s papers, it is clear that Roger’s is the stronger of the two. Janet’s may be an effective report on her findings, but her voice, her authority, is missing, and that detracts from what she’s trying to say. Those of us that are still writing like Janet can learn something from Roger. Instead of doubting the thoughts we might have during our writing, we should lean into them and include them. After all, that’s where our power comes from.
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