How to Write with Authority

I never liked my senior year English class.

The teacher was demanding, the content uninteresting (mostly research papers), and I didn’t get a good grade.

But somehow, through some kind of teacher voodoo, she managed to teach me something that I have never forgotten.

What she left me with turned out to be a little pearl of wisdom, one that has greatly helped my own writing and will help yours too.

Putting the ‘Author’ back in ‘Authority’

It’s not for nothing that the word authority comes from author. There is a strong connection between writing and that sense of trust that exists in a person’s mind when he perceives someone to be an authority. To write with authority means to write in such a way that you create that sense of trust in the reader.

So how do you do that?

Write with Confidence

The first step, the one my English teacher taught me, is to stop being wishy-washy in your writing. Everyone knows that your words are your opinion and not written in stone. Everything is debatable, everything can be argued.

That’s no excuse to qualify everything you write with “my opinion is…” or “this is just my opinion but…”, this is not the way to come across as confident!  Don’t tell people what you think, tell them the way it is. Don’t say this is my opinion, say this is the truth.  Write like you know what you’re talking about, stop hedging and qualifying.

Writing with authority is all about confidence, or at least creating the image of confidence, even if you don’t feel all that confident in what your writing.

Take a Stand

This means you’re going to have to take a stand. I know you want to appear tolerant and open to different views and all that, but being an authority means being opinionated, strongly opinionated. Yes, taking a stand means you might be inviting opposition and disagreement, but that’s the price to pay for being an author-ity.

Make a Solid Case

Of course, it helps if your opinion does not rest on sand, but is built on solid ground. You need to be able to make a strong case for your stated opinion. This means making your case with sound logic and argument.

Even better is stating a strongly argued and confidently stated opinion delivered with rhetorically powerful words, words that deliver your message with a punch, that makes the reader go ‘Dang – that was awesome!’.

But logic and rhetoric are topics for another time. One can go a long way in writing with authority just by writing strongly with confidence. Then you will begin to be not only an authority, but an author.