Authority in Writing: Confidence (pt 2)

You can have all the knowledge in the world, but if you don’t believe in yourself and your abilities, you have no authority.  It’s so easy to get intimidated when writing in an academic setting: there’s always someone out there who knows more than you, someone who writes better than you, and someone who has had more education and experience than you could ever even hope to achieve. 

But you have to remember to believe in yourself!

You made it to college.  You have skills and abilities that brought you this far; why wouldn’t they continue just because you left high school?  Use those skills to show off your knowledge.  You may not be the best writer, but you can still own what you write.  The only way to gain more experience and improve your writing skills is to keep writing.  Those scholars and academics that it can be so intimidating didn’t start out writing 30 page research papers like it was nothing.  They started out in your place, college freshmen who were insecure in who they were and how they wrote.  And chances are, they still deal with insecurities from time to time, especially when it’s in a field of study in which they aren’t familiar.  Donald Murray, who was a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper columnist as well as published writer in poetry and textbooks, described his feelings of inadequacy when he took part in a colleague’s case study to analyze the writing processes of experienced, professional writers.  But he didn’t let those fears and self-doubts hold him back; in fact, they made him work even harder to make sure he did the best he could.

When you write during your college years, trust in yourself and be confident that you know what you’re doing…even if you don’t.  If you pretend you believe in your abilities long enough, sooner or later it’ll happen for real.  Confidence is a developmental process, and an important one to have.