Sullivan and Harris on the Same Page

Joseph Harris, author of Rewriting, describes to us his own definition of reading and writing. Harris highlights the importance of embedding the words and thoughts of other writers into what we want to say. In other words, writing is responding to intellectuals who have already written about our topic and then adding our own opinions and our own voice.  Harris perfectly sums up the concept when he says,  “the job of an intellectual is to push and questions what has been said before, to rethink and reinterpret the texts he or she is dealing with.” In this quote we find the significance of the title, Rewriting; Harris encourages us to treat our writing as if we are adding, commenting, and utilizing the works of others in our own writing. Harris even gives us examples of how he has drawn from the works of authors in his book about telling us how to do exactly that. Another piece of advice Harris gives is that to understand a text we have to rewrite it and make it our own; to reveal the meaning of a text we need to actively make sense of them. Essentially we have to read texts through the lens of our own experience in order for them to mean something.  Harris agues that rewriting can also be seen as a coming to terms because we have to realize that writing is a negotiation between reader and writer. In the words of Harris,  "You come to terms with a text by translating its words and ideas into your own language, making them part of your own prose…”

            The way Joseph Harris describes writing is comparable to the way Andrew Sullivan describes blogging. The main connection I found was the similarities between how Sullivan said blogging was a combination of the writers thoughts, ideas, and research as well as his audience and the way Harris explained the writing is a combination of other writing and our own thoughts. Basically both men are saying that in both blogging and writing the writer reads a topic and then reacts to it in a way that is his or her own. Another similarity I found is the conversational nature of both Harris and Sullivan’s writing. Harris and Sullivan both make use of the first person which gives what they write a much more personal tone. Harris also reveals to use that he prefers his writings to be part of public life and aimed at a broad range of the general public readers, almost like a blog. Blogging follows almost all of the advice that Harris gives to us in the first couple chapters of his book, Rewriting.