Joseph Harris: Rewriting

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. Logan: Utah State UP, 2006.

Much like the project at work in They Say / I Say, Joseph Harris' Rewriting seeks to place student writers in conversation with other texts and authors. His first concern is avoiding the automatization of writing by arcane rules and strictures: “This kind of work often gets talked about in ways – avoiding plagiarism, documenting sources, citing authorities, acknowledging influences – that make it seema dreary and legalistic concern” (2). This was a point to which I definitely related, as at times it feels as though I am the harbinger of such tedium, especially on documentation and formatting days. It is worthwhile, then, to consider Harris' revision to this stasis, instead recognizing that “writing hinges on this idea of a move” (3, his emphasis). A move. Action. Reaction. Energy. Momentum. A process Harris denotes as “rewriting.” Sounds a lot better in the composition classroom.

Harris outlines five modes of rewriting: “coming to terms, forwarding, countering, taking an approach, and revising” (4, his emphases). He tackles each one in the subsequent chapters. Coming to terms deals with utilizing, or to use Harris' term “re-presenting” (17), other texts in a way that is not arbitrary or combative but, above all, useful to a writer's goals. The key here is that, while texts are something that enable a call-and-response conversation, they do not dictate the course of one's thoughts and arguments. They are merely there to enhance one's understanding of complex ideas through generous reading (16-28). Harris prefers the language of “forwarding” a text to that of “responding” to a text, since often (and especially in the case of dearly departed authors) we are not answering the authors we cite as much as we are forwarding their ideas to embolden our own ideas. In this process of forwarding, “you begin to shift the focus of your readers away from what its author has to say and toward your own project” (38), keeping the process of writing motivated for the writer. While Harris goal in the chapter on countering is to show writers how to extrapolate the limitations of someone else's text, he is critical of “the sort of argument whose goal is simply to vanquish your opponent” (67). This is a particularly useful notion in that I have found it difficult to shift students away from the “I'm right, you're wrong (about everything)” model to more of a believing game model. My favorite chapter dealt with taking an approach because it dealt with perhaps the highest order of writing skills. Harris here advocates for not simply responding or “rewriting” a text, but adopting an author's methodology. I appreciated most the qualities he suggest in such an approach: acknowledging influences, turning an approach on itself, and reflexivity (79). These tactics, it seems to me, offer the most potential for creative thinking. At least in my experience, reflexivity begets reflexivity, and in thinking about the methodology behind your text, it is difficult not to think about the reasons why you're writing in such a way, about the very subject one is dealing with, in fact. Which leads to the practice of revision. Now obviously these skills have immediate benefits on one's writing. But the true importance of these techniques is in gleaning a new perspective on one's own writing. They enable a writer to question his or her own text, to think critically about the larger project at hand and the meaning(s) behind such a task (98-9). And as he notes in his introduction, these “moves do not by any means compose a fixed sequence for writing a critical essay” (5), enabling a writer to call on an arsenal of tools that strengthen them not only through the writing process, but through the (critical) thinking process as well, if these two processes can even be delineated.

Harris text lead me to question the kinds of research projects I am assigning students. Perhaps the issue with critical thinking is not so much that students are resistant to it. Though there will probably always be a few insurgents, maybe the real matter is challenging them material that is actually meaningful to them. This raises questions about what the “interdisciplinary classroom” might actually look like. But I wonder if critical thinking would be more amicably embraced if students were freer to engage with sources that touched closer to their home discipline than ones that feel too Englishy. To think critically about environmental science equations is not the same as thinking critically about new kinds of accounting methodologies, which is not the same as thinking critically about Pre-K pedagogy... etc, etc. I question if it might be better to give students a reason, as Harris calls for, “to engage with and rewrite the work of other thinkers” (2), thinkers in whom students are actually interested, not thinkers I force upon them through the medium of my syllabus. For even I would have a hard time thinking critically about a subject with which I had little interest, much less one upon which I had even less grasp.