Age, gender, confidence, and other such variables contributing to the authority with which people write is acknowledged by Ann M. Penrose and Cheryl Geisler in their study “Reading and Writing Without Authority.” The two participants of the study, Roger and Janet, write about the same topic—Roger being an expert in it, and Janet an “outsider”—to see how differently they write, considering their gap in authority in the field.
Throughout the study, Penrose and Geisler frequently point out Janet’s use of “traditional information-transfer” (that is, writing about a subject as an objective reporter, rather than as a commenter with a side). They default the reason for her use of it as a result of being denied “personal authority… in school contexts.” While I don’t completely disagree with that statement, I think there is something else at play that is going unrecognized: too little knowledge and understanding of a topic, and a fear of misrepresenting it.
As was stated in the beginning, Janet is unfamiliar with the writing topic of paternalism and when it can be applied. That could have very well been why she treated the binder of multiple articles as a collective instead of individualistic—or vice versa. Either way, she lacked understanding. It’s inevitable; academic articles are usually written for those already engrossed in them, not an outsider like her. However, this puts her at a disadvantage for following some of the guidelines of the paper that require her opinion: How can she form an opinion on something she likely doesn’t understand to its fullest?
Opinions surface from understanding and recognizing faulty or correct ideas, be it in your stance or another’s. This is why I struggled to write one of my previous blog posts: “Technology and Its Untapped Potential for Literacies.” I couldn’t grasp a good chunk of what Carmen Luke was trying to get at in his article “Pedagogy, Connectivity, Multimodality, and Interdisciplinary,” despite rereading it; I was so overwhelmed by the abundant and unfamiliar vocabulary he used in the article that I could not form an opinion or reaction other than confusion, which would not suffice as a blog post topic in this case. Neither could I rely on centering my blog post on James Paul Gee’s article “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction,” as even though I understood it, its concepts were still too new for me to form opinions. So, I took the easier route of loosely following the themes of both articles and combining them into something I could touch on. By doing this, I was also able to avoid what I was most cautious of: putting words in Luke’s mouth as a result of my confusion.
Luckily, I had the room to do such improvisation since the only “rule” I had to follow while writing that blog post was that it was a reaction of sorts. Janet, in contrast, had to abide by more specific rules, such as paraphrasing and explaining a topic she likely didn’t understand fully. So it makes sense that she chose to lean towards quoting and reporting the articles; it was the easiest option to follow the guidelines as closely as she could.
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