Digressions 2: Meet the author and his text (i.e., me and my writing)

Digressions (2a)

Reinking is Professor of Education at the University of Georgia where he serves as the head of the Department of Reading Education. He is also a principal investigator with the National Reading Research Center funded through the Office of Educational Research and Improvement by the U.S. Office of Education. He is currently the editor of the Journal of Literacy Research. Reinking's primary research interest is in the connection between technology and literacy. His publications in that area have appeared in highly regarded outlets such as Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Reading Behavior, and the Handbook of Reading Research. He edited a volume entitled Reading and Computers: Issues for Theory and Practice (published by Teachers College Press) and is currently lead editor for a volume entitled Literacy for the 21st Century: Technological Transformations in a Post-Typographic World (to be published by Lawrence Erlbaum). Previously, Reinking taught language arts for 8 years as an elementary school teacher.

A brief biographical sketch like this customarily accompanies scholarly publications, and indeed the editors wanted one to accompany the printed article. I wrote it myself, consciously composing it to seem as if someone else wrote it about me. One of its thinly veiled purposes is to impress upon readers that I am in some sense qualified and worthy to claim several of the precious pages in a published journal and to adopt the authoritative voice publication in print invites. As this practice suggests, the author of a printed text, especially an academic one, typically takes on the persona of an impersonal authority; after all, "author" and "authority" are joined etymologically at the hip. Therefore, to play the role of a conventional author, one (I) typically must assume an impersonal authoritative voice that attempts to mask personal (my) biases and present a single internally consistent argument. Thus, tentativeness and self-doubt are not typically consonant with printed texts, at least published ones. To write like an author of a printed text, one (I) must write like an authority, which means working to construct (convey the image of) a formidable edifice of unassailable meaning.

Fortunately for many of us who need to publish, this stance, though difficult to achieve initially, is not difficult to maintain in the world of print. Especially in academia the technological demands of printing (more accurately the costs) sustain the belief that only lofty thinkers or those who can manipulate language skillfully to portray that image rise above the masses to be published (you may recall recent news reports of a hoax in which an academic journal published a bogus article). Grandiose pronouncements can sometimes be made authoritatively in print without the worry that just anyone can easily take issue with them or call into question one's (my) objectivity. After all, if someone is considered worthy of publication, they are assumed to possess authoritative knowledge. This idealized, and sometimes idolized, conception of an author is probably what explains the sense of occasion and intrigue we experience in meeting an author in the flesh. And it should be pointed out (i.e., I'd like to point out) that this perception is a good example of how the technology of print shapes our perceptions of what it means to read and write.

But electronic reading and writing invite a much less formal, honest approach to writing, because whether authors (I) like it or not, they are (I am) much less remote. Consider, for example, what happens when I provide the following information, which is becoming increasingly common in printed articles:

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Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted May 1997
Published by the International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232