Penrose/Geisler Reading

***MR. WHICKER: MY POST FOR PAPER 4 IS BELOW THIS ONE!***

Summary
In this article, "Reading and Writing without Authority" Penrose and Geisler perform a study where they look at the writing styles of two people. A freshman English student (Janet) and a philosophy doctorate student, (Roger). They ask both students to write papers on paternity. They looked at the context, and overall quality of the papers and made inferences about the authority the papers held. The purpose of their study was to investigate how such differences in authority are played out in the academic sphere. They were particularly interested in how the lack of authority shapes the reading and writing practices students adopt. They concluded that confidence in one's own authority is assumed to increase generally with age,but gender also may influence this development. They then looked into conflicting authorities, for instance, when two papers both seem authoritative, yet have conflicting information/opinions. Overall, I gathered that this article was about how to know if someone is an "insider". In other words, reading two passages, and being able to tell which one to trust/which one was written by the college freshman, and which was written by the philosophy doctorate student.

Questions For Discussion
3. Janet, like us, has just finished high school were we were taught that when you have to write a paper, you find a ton of information about the topic, (usually online) and you either mentally or physically copy and paste it into your paper. It is literally like second nature to me in regards to doing a research paper. We are stuck in the mold of "you need 6 sources, 2 books, 2 websites, 2 articles. I don't care how you do it, just put it in the paper." And that is what we do. In order to receive credit, we find any random book,website and article and stick it in the paper. However, in the situation, Roger is writing his paper a little differently. Actually, a lot differently. Because of his major, he doesn't necessarily need to look up a lot of information. He may already know a lot about paternity/remember cases/studies he has seen about the topic and be able to use that as information to put into his paper. Also, the information that he does include, unlike Janet, he can make in depth inferences about and reflect upon the matter in a philosophical and intellectual way that Janet cannot simply reach yet.
4. Janet is choosing to trust the authors of her text more than herself simply because they are published writers, and she is not. She is afraid to wonder from their main points and opinions because she is not sure if they are valid/she knows for a fact that the authors claims are legitimate and true. Or so she believes. She, like many people, are automatically trusting of other people that they perceive to be smarter than themselves. Which isn't a bad thing, but in my opinion, it can keep people from going out on a limb and making their own inferences, in saying "So-and-so believes X, Y and Z, while I understand their claims, I believe A, B, and C can also be true."
5. I believe my writing is more like Janet's. I am guilty of the information-transfer model. While I would love to be able to write like Roger, I believe that writing not only takes a level of bravery and confidence, it takes a lot of experience. I do not believe that Roger's writing is something that happens over night, or that can be rushed. I believe that if I go on to a master's degree, I will eventually, and unknowingly, begin to write more like Roger because of the knowledge and experience I have picked up along the way.

Meta Moment
Next time I go to write a research paper, this article will have helped me in 1. my writing style and 2. my confidence. In the beginning of the article, (in paragraph 1 on pg 604) the authors talk about how Janet feels the need to define paternity and what it means/functions as. In Roger's paper, he assumes that the reader knows this information already, and is able to get down to more in depth inferences. I don't know if feeling obligated to define your topic is novice, but I do think that skipping the basic information about paternity would have made her intro a little more mature. Also, I learned that saying "in this paper" is a big bad idea. It makes it seem like there was no author, and the paper holds the information, not the author.

My Own Thoughts
I thought that most of the information in this article was kind of assumed. I could have guessed that a doctorate student would write a more authoritative paper than a college freshman. However, I did learn from this article how to make my papers a little more mature by making slight changes/improvements to my style and how I structure some sentences. I didn't mind reading it because all in all, I did get some helpful hints out of it, however I thought that the study that they did was somewhat predictable. However, they did make inferences about the differences in their writing that I wouldn't have necessarily noticed. I am also happy that our readings due today were cut in half. So, I have absolutely nothing to complain about.