In the article, “Reading and Writing without Authority”, the importance of writing with authority is discussed, and how a person’s writing style can influence the point of a piece and how it comes out. In the article, two people were asked to write on the topic of paternalism, with each writer having their own take on how to write a paper regarding the topic and what information to pull from the provided articles. Throughout the article, there was a noticeable difference between the writers, Janet and Roger, due to what they focused on as they thought out loud and curated their pieces. Janet was scared to handle controversies and put her own thoughts and opinions into her piece whereas Roger took chances, tested varying authors’ claims, and was delighted at the controversies that surfaced while sifting through the articles. Roger’s ability to delve into his piece and insert himself showed that he had authority over his work and was willing to challenge and critique both his own work as well as the authors of the articles that he read. On the other hand, Janet only ever used examples to clarify her piece and she did not use any kind of authority- she stuck solely to the information provided without inputting herself at all. As Penrose and Geisler mentioned in the article, Janet is an outsider looking in whereas Roger is an insider with an authoritative voice and personality.
I think that this piece was an extremely interesting read and really picked at my brain because of the way that I write. While reading this article, I had to remind myself that, while Roger is a more seasoned writer, completing any doctoral work needed in philosophy, Janet was a college freshman, straight out of high school, with significantly less experience. This definitely had an impact as to how I viewed each writer but I definitely still found myself critiquing Janet for her inability to insert herself into her piece, even though she had moments where she had deeper thoughts- at the end, she voided out any ounce of her own thoughts or opinions from her piece and it became solely informational and more on the factual side. Although I found myself judging Janet, I also related to her because I still have problems with inserting myself into my writing because of how I was taught to write in high school and previous college courses. I was always told to make my papers strictly factual, without including any of my opinions or thoughts, and to only ever use the third person point of view. I had this problem with my first few blog posts- I summarized the information without inserting myself into my writing due to the unimportance of ‘I’ being drilled into my head for years. I want to change this and I will continue to work to change this, even if it means I have to rewrite pieces of completely trash them.
This article and authoritative writing tie into Heine’s article on the importance of finding a voice in writing. Without having authority in my writing, it makes it nearly impossible to find my voice and my style because my writing is completely void of me, my thoughts and ideas, and any kind of essence as to who I am as a writer. As I mentioned in my blog post about finding my voice in writing, I need to insert myself and my own style of writing in order for people to identify me as a writer and for me to gain confidence in my pieces. In order for me to develop as a writer and move forward, I need to have the strength to insert myself into my pieces and formulate my own ideas based on someone else’s work, even if it challenges what they say. In order to be a good credible writer, I need to be a strong voice that faces controversies head-on instead of hiding from them, and I need to test authors’ claims to see if what they’re saying is true, is actually true, or makes sense based on other research. Without authoritative writing, a piece isn’t as strong and it just becomes another work of writing amongst the ineffective bunch.
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