Sommers criticized earlier essays of hers for having a wimpy voice, and states “I must bring a voice of my own. I must enter the dialogue on my own authority, knowing that other voices have enabled mine, but no longer can I subordinate mine to theirs” (284)
She observes the presence of “an inherited academic voice… that anemic researcher, who set herself apart from her most passionate convictions… I simply wasn’t there for my own talk” (282). While she acknowledges “all the voices I embody” and doesn’t want to deny the findings of her early research, she (like so many other scholars these days) challenges the either/or proposition in university writing — personal *or* academic.
She wants students “not to write in the persona of Everystudent … to an audience they think of as Everyteacher… but rather to write essays that will change the academy” (284-85). She wants to help her students negotiate the tricky terrain between citing existing authority and establishing their own, claiming that “it is in the thrill of the pull between someone else’s authority and our own, between submission and independence, that we must discover how to define ourselves” (285). (The Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook, 4th ed. Ed. Corbett, Myers, and Tate. New York: Oxford, 2000. 279-85.)