Joseph Harris’s goal with his book Rewriting: How to do things with texts was not to provide a manual for writing, but to teach people how to take other peoples words in scholarly writing and use them for your own purpose. This I am thankful for. I like to think that I know how to write, but I do still need work on analyzing and using other scholarly works in my own writing to make a point. Harris finds this to be at the heart of all writing, to add to or respond to another’s writing in order to add to the conversation. This is also what I think writing should be. Using others work not just to defend your work, but to add upon and create meaning from another’s work.
Sullivan and Harris both see writing as way to convey information to readers. However Harris’s take is in a much more structured and scholarly direction.
No comments:
Post a Comment