Book Two: Rewriting: How to Do Things With Texts by Joseph Harris

Rewriting is about improving methods of using others work in "critical essays" or academic essays. But I secretly have such faith in the methods in Harris's book, I think they can be applied to any form of creative writing or creative essaying.

*It's important to note here that academic writing has the potential to be entertaining, informative, and inspirational. I personally feel that academic essays can be more than just proof that a student has read and can recite knowledge, and this belief is echoed strongly in the philosophy that Harris offers. In his words he wants to shift our talk of writing away from the static language of thesis and structure and toward a more dynamic vocabulary of action, gesture, and response.

"My aim of this book is to help you make interesting use of the texts you read in the essays you write," Harris says. "The question for an academic writer...is how to come up with something else, to add to what has already been said."

The book is broken into what Harris calls "moves": 1.) Coming to terms, 2.) Forwarding, 3.) Countering, 4.) Taking an approach, and 5.) Revising.

"I have ordered the chapters of this book,  however, to suggest a kind of ethics in academic writing, a sense that intellectual  work both starts and ends in acknowledging the strengths of other perspectives."

The book serves a dual purpose: How to appropriately and skillfully represent the work of others in my analytical essays, and also how to potentially use the work of others in more free form creative non fiction. 

I have shared the frustration with other students who feel overwhelmed when it comes to synthesizing large bodies of work, whether it be a piece of fiction or factual information. Harris asks many useful questions in his text to help out with this dilemma:

 "How do you offer the gist of an ambitious, complex, and perhaps quite long text in the space of a few paragraphs or sentences?"

" How do you select certain phrases or ideas for emphasis?"

"When do you quote and when do you paraphrase?"

Again, this ILC is not about academic writing per se, but still falls under the vein of essay writing, -essay writing being so incredibly verbose, Harris's writing philosophy will be beneficial to any writing form, even if he has 

a specific target in mind.

I fell in love with this book when I was a junior and I am very excited to spend more time with it.

-Gavin