Penrose’s and Geisler’s article, “Reading and Writing without Authority” shows the importance of writing with authority because it demonstrates to readers that the author incorporates genuine ideas and concrete arguments, rather than restating truths from academic sources. A student who writes with authority is unafraid to express their thoughts and argue with the author’s ideas than just accept facts. Penrose and Geisler demonstrate two students in their article. Janet, the college freshman, and Roger completing his doctoral work in philosophy. From the moment I read that Janet was a freshman, I knew right away that she was going to be the student that would write without authority because she lacked academic experience in the writing field. Perhaps the high-school mentality of writing could influence why she wrote without authority.
Janet
The task that Janet and Roger had was to write a paper defining paternalism based on certain authors’ ideas. Right away when reading Janet’s paper introduction, I was able to tell that she was excluding herself from the writing. The moment one writes “ this paper will,“ gives authority to a non-existent character because the paper is not an identity. Janet is a person with an identity and ideas. Penrose and Geisler compare her approach to Roger’s and it is obvious that she does not include her own thoughts. She transfers information from the articles into her paper, but where is her argument? Where is her own claim to the definition of paternalism? Janet’s issue is that she disregards herself as an author. She does not involve her experiences, and judgment, and does not respond as an author, but rather responds based on proven facts. Janet set out to align herself with one of the positions already available (Penrose and Geisler.) Janet was supposed to state her own perspective with authority before already taking a stand with a position that already exists. She should have gone back and forth with the authors’ ideas to take authority in her argument as well. Janet sees all texts, except her own argument (Penrose and Geisler.)
Roger
Roger is the prime example of writing with authority. It is pretty obvious that as a candidate for a doctorate, Roger knows how to integrate his voice into the writing process. Roger’s voice is the main authority in his paper. Janet has no authority in her writing, on the contrary, she speaks more about the truths of other authors. As Penrose and Geisler state, Roger is playful, tentative, and exploratory. He knows that he can and does change his mind in his examples (Penrose and Geisler.) In other words, Roger nailed the authoritative voice that the authors of the article were studying.
My thoughts
After reading this article and past ones, I have concluded that as students we have the right to have authority in our writing. If we do not have any authority in our writing, the writing prompt that we are working on is not really our voice, the writing will be repeating facts from academic resources. The “Teaching Towards Authority” section provided the specific reason why Janet did not have authority in her writing. In order for Janet to take authority in this or any situation, she needs to believe there is authority to spare–that there is room for many voices. She needs to understand the development of knowledge as a communal and continual process (Penrose and Geisler.) When reading those two sentences, I was glad that besides explaining the difference between authoritative and nonauthoritative writing, the authors actually educate the readers to build up authority in their writing. Students need to believe that our voices have the right to be clear and loud in writing. There is authority to spare, otherwise than what is the point of writing a paper without actually our analysis? This article has provided me with great insight into how I can become more authoritative in my writing.
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