In this article, Nancy Sommers discusses her life and what personality traits the people around her exemplified. She spoke of her childhood and the authority that came with it, her passion for drafting, and how her work as a teacher helps her to grow. There was one specific sentence which stood out to me, “it is deeply satisfying to believe that we are not locked into our original statements, that we might start and stop, erase, use the delete key in life, and be saved from the roughness of our early drafts”. This statement stood out to me because of how she relates a task that I always viewed as tedious and uninspiring towards everyone’s life, but not in the boring sense. She simply says that it is possible to find inspiration within editing because it reminds her that things can always improve. There is a starting point in life, and from that point, things don’t have to be permanent. They begin as rough drafts and are slowly drafted into exactly what we’re looking for; exactly who we are. Unfortunately for Sommers, she had been spending the whole time revising simply hiding behind the guide books. She had been lost within the translations, while she should have been discovered.
As we read further into the article, we discover more about Sommers’ life. We find out her insecurities and she reveals her actions between the drafts and how things change as life continues forward. She is a woman of regrets and at certain points, lives in the past. It was good to read her transition from insecurity to realizing the power of her authority. She knows that her own life experiences give her the right to speak out about revision and other such topics, and she regrets the previous need to mention other writers in her attempt to promote herself.
It becomes more interesting as she brings up the topic of authority in academic papers. She has the stance of taking control and writing confidently in academic matters while other teachers believe the mixture of these as well as personal writing may cause an end of the world. I think mixture is important to the well rounded writer, so long as the writing is relevant and credible.
In conclusion, I think it’s incredible how this idea of “authority” can pass down so similarly throughout generations. Sommers’ article was interesting and I’d read another piece by her any day.
