Harris’ book Rewriting is a book about how to write, (thank you captain obvious). But it is how he defines the art of reading and writing that makes this book unique from other writing guides. According to Harris the process of writing is taking a previous written text and put in a different perspective. He believes the purpose of rewriting a text is to allow the audience to think differently about the text, maybe see both sides of an argument. Harris defines reading as taking a text, whether is be a book, movie, poem, painting etc, and discover the author’s purpose for creating that particular text. Reading is extracting the meaning out of an existing text.
When I compare Harris’ definitions of reading and writing to previously blogged about Andrew Sullivan’s definitions, I find a few differences. Mainly, Sullivan seems more casual or blasé about writing. Given the medium each author works with, blogs being more casual, I understand why Harris’ text has a more serious tone to it. Sullivan writes freely because freedom is a blogger’s best friend. On the other hand, Harris defines writing as a strict, almost formulaic process because he is writing an academic book about how to write academically. I neither agree nor disagree with either author because it is difficult to make a comparison when the authors medium as well as audience are entirely different.
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