Being an Expert… Or Not

I found a lot of Bartholome’s arguments in “Inventing the University” to be valid, even if I found the paper to be super boring. I mostly wanted to focus on the idea of authority in writing. This is something I have struggled with a lot in my own writing, the feeling that I’m not enough of an authority on a subject to speak about it in any position of power. It took a really long time for me to feel comfortable to take the phrase “I think” out of my arguments because I never felt that I had the privilege to have my own ideas be fact. I was not an expert on what ever topic I was writing on, whether it be a work of literature or a scientific paper, so I didn’t feel I could take a stand and argue my point as one hundred percent true. Batholome talks about this problem on the bottom of page 9 and the top of 10 when he is discussing audience awareness and how it is not always a great thing. What I think he means by this is that when you know who your audience is, say an English professor, then you know that they probably know more than you on the subject. This creates a feeling of inadequacy and lack of confidence in students, and can lead to them just believing they’re not good writers. It’s important to get students to feel like in that moment of writing that paper, that they are the expert. Bartholome uses the example of writing to explain something to an alien or to someone who knows nothing about your topic. This puts students automatically into a position of authority. I think those exercises are fine, but at some point you have to convince your students that they just have to write like they are the expert, with strong and compelling arguments, whether or not they’re writing for someone who technically has more authority than them.

I have a hard time with the idea of writing differently for various fields. Maybe because at this point in my academic career, I have found my voice and know how write effectively in different contexts. Sometimes this gets me into trouble because I get the comment a lot of times that I write too casually but I honestly don’t know how to write any differently. When I was dabbling in other majors, I always got compliments on my writing, that it was my greatest skill. But in the english department I’ve gotten a mix of A’s and B’s, which I really don’t mind, but then I don’t get the help I need to improve, or the professor isn’t as clear with what they want because they assume that as english majors we just know what they want. And that’s just not true because every professor seems to want something different, for different types of assignments even. And for me I can generally figure it out, because I am good at writing, but for students outside this environment, I think it can be a difficult thing to figure out for new writers (I mean new as in, still figuring this whole writing thing out. Not that I’m not still figuring things out, but that I’ve had a lot more practice to figure things out. You know what I mean).