Feb. 27th Homework

Penrose & Geisler Summary:
In their article "Reading and Writing Without Authority", Penrose and Geisler conducted a study on two different people and their writing styles. One of the people was a freshman English student, whose name was Janet, and a philosophy doctorate student, Roger. Janet and Roger were bother asked to write a paper on paternity. Once they were done, their overall context and the authority that was used in each paper. They concluded that the older you get, the more confident you get in your writings. I think the main purpose of this article was to be able to show the difference in authority with a freshman English student and a philosophy doctorate student.

QD: 3-5
3. Janet is basically in the same boat as us. She had just graduated from high school and is now a freshman in college and she probably doesn't have much knowledge on the topic so she probably gets most/all of her information from books and the Internet. I'd say she did this just because of the fact that she doesn't have the prior knowledge that she needs to make a good paper. Roger on the other hand may not need to do all this research because he probably has better knowledge.
4. I'd say she'd choose the published author over herself because the author is obviously published and is more reliable in her eyes than her own self. If she were to come up with something on her own, then she doesn't really know if it's true or not, and because this author is published, then she may just trust that it's true and go with that instead of her own thoughts.
5. My writing is definitely more like Janet's. I believe this just because I'm also a freshman in English and I look up research all the time through the Internet and books because I don't have a lot of knowledge on things that we have to write about. It would be nice to be like Roger, but it would require me to have a lot of knowledge and the good writing skills like him to be able to sit down and write an amazing paper.

MM:
I believe the next time I sit down and write a paper, I'm going to try to be more confident in my writing and focus more on how I actually write. I know that when I'm reading a paper or article and I can tell that the author(s) is pretty confident in what they're saying, then that kind of adds more credibility and it's more enjoyable to read because their own views and opinions get put into it.

Response:
Overall, I think this was a good article for us to read, just because it shows that the more time and effort that you put into a paper, the better it will come out. Writing isn't an easy thing to do and it takes a lot of time and practice to become really good at and we need to be more confident in our writings to become better writers.