Show me the Expert: Balancing Authority and Humility
I wrote a post yesterday and It left me feeling a bit uneasy.
It wasn’t that the content was incongruent with my feelings. It wasn’t that I felt I revealed something I didn’t have a right to feel. I don’t think it was solely based on the realization that my writing skills have changed (for the worse) since I completed grad school 2 years ago.
I think it might have more to do with a disconcerting feeling that I don’t know anything absolutely. After all these years of post-secondary education, I don’t feel I can express an opinion on a subject that I am a supposed expert in, without feeling that I somehow gave a subjective, incomplete, or opinionated treatment of it. Something that was not simply fact, but rather tainted with misconceptions, prejudice, and outdated information.
Is it possible to write in this medium from a position of authority? I don’t think many of us can. There are people operating at the bleeding edge of their field who possess the knowledge that would allow it… the rest of us only know fragments… a fragmented view of the whole. When we write for the larger audience, we have to expect that others will come along and correct us. So how does one write while maintaining a balance of authority and humility? is that the great skill of expert bloggers? What about health care providers? Politicians?
