Coming to Terms

Joseph Harris’s book, Rewriting, skips the fundamental aspects of writing and dives straight in to what we need to do to make our writing interesting. Usually, an assigned reading on writing would contain material that we have been trying to perfect over the years, but instead, Harris is basically telling us what to do and what not to do in writing. His perspective on writing is quite interesting. His outline of summarizing and quoting new material should have been taught to us years ago. He is able to make his point crystal clear by telling us to rewrite something so someone isn’t reading the same thing again, instead incorporate little details and make it your own writing. Harris feels that in order to write successfully, you need to be able to read some else’s paper and be able to summarize it but most importantly, change it to make it your own with a completely different message. As well as summarizing, he demonstrates how not to abuse quotes and over uses it in our writing. What he is basically trying to get at is for the writer to be more personal with their work instead of using someone else’s work throughout their writing. This is very similar to Sullivan’s look on blogging because he feels blogging makes writing more personal. They are both recognizing the lack of personal purpose in writing and in each case, are doing something different to rediscover it. Sullivan has found it in blogging, and Harris is trying to reteach it.