Joseph Harris is one super interesting man

Harris  defines academic writing as "situating your thoughts about a text or issue in relation to what others have written about it" (1). This is similar to Sullivan's "Why I Blog" because they both speak about the importance of intertextuality, how the readers and writers respond to each other and shape each others' writings. I see a similarity in both authors desire to create a text not with the "fixed and static language of thesis and structure" but rather as a movement "in tandem with or in response to others, a a part of a game or dance or performance or conversation" (4).  The purpose of blogging and rewriting is not to just summarize and spit back what has already been said before, but to add your opinion and value and discuss the opinions of others.

Harris goes further into the purpose of writing/rewriting in the Coming to Terms chapter, and I think that this is the most important line: "You are not simply re-presenting a text but incorporating it into your own project as  a writer. You thus need only to explain what you think it means but to say something about the perspective from which you are reading it" (15). I like this quote because it is simply and easy to understand, while clearly defining what it means to "come to terms" with a text while writing. 

Harris says that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text because they do not simply reveal their meaning to us. And since we use our own experiences and concerns to decipher the texts that we read, there's no such thing as a "completely acurate and objective summary, a view from nowhere" (15). So the goal of reading and rewriting is to represent the work of another in a fair and self-reflective manner. The idea is to "translate the language and ideas of a text into words of your own, as a coming to terms- since, among other thingsm the phrase suggests a settling of accounts, a negotiation between reader and writer" (15).

Reading these chapters, I thought that Harris had very interesting points to make, but I felt like there was some repetition that made it difficult  to read. For me, his style of writing made it easy to understand, but difficult to actually get through.