blog 17

Summary:

In Penrose and Geisler’s article Reading and Writing Without Authority, they conducted a study of two people and there writing styles. One was a freshman english student and the other was a philosophy doctorate student. Both the people wrote a paper on the same topic, paternity. When they were done they looked at the overall paper and how authority was used. The researchers concluded that as age increases your authority and confidence in you writing also increases. I think that the main point of this article was to show how different two papers can be at different levels of education.

Questions:

3. Janets view knowledge and Rogers view of knowledge are both very different. Since Janet is just a freshman, she probably had to go and gather a lot of info from the internet and books to write this paper. She had to do this because she probably does not have a lot of prior knowledge about the topic. However Roger probably did not have to do as much research because he is older and has a lot more knowledge in general than a freshman student would.

4.I think this was the case because any freshman English student would trust a published author rather than themselves. Also she does not want to come up with her own points or ideas that she doesn’t know if they are true or not, but she knows for a fact the what she is reading is true.

5. I know that my writing is more like Janet’s. First because we are both freshman English students, and I can relate better to her problems with writing. Also, I do not have the knowledge that Rogers has to just be able to sit down and be able to produce a great paper. It takes a lot of time and effort.

MM:

I think next time I write a paper I will try and focus more on how I write and what I am saying and also try and be more confident with my ideas. I have learned that when the writer shows confidence in there writing and shows that they know what they are talking about that reader will be more likely to listen.

Response: Overall I think that this was a good article for us to read. It showed me that become a great writer takes a long time and its not something that I will be able to accomplish in my freshman English class. And also that confidence and authority a really big part of writing, which is something I need to focus more on.