P6 Forwarding

After reading Harris’s chapter titled Forwarding, I feel like I really only needed to read the first five pages to understand what his definition of the word is. He described what his idea of forwarding meant, briefly described four types of forwarding, and then provided all of these confusing, drawn-out examples of each type. I lost interest and focus a few pages into what “Illustrating” means.

With that aside, I think I still have a pretty decent grasp on what “forwarding” a text means. One of Harris’s first points in this chapter is the metaphor that writing is a conversation. He says that the purpose of writing an essay is not to have the final say an in argument, but rather to continue the discussion of the topic or add more input to an ongoing discussion. Harris writes, “A dialogue is not a debate. You don’t win a conversation, you add to it, push it ahead, keep it going…” (Harris 36). I agree with this point Harris makes. Unless writing a persuasive essay, you don’t set out to write an essay to convince someone that your opinion or ideas are the best and correct. You write an essay to introduce new ideas or to put your own spin on a topic. The goal of an essay is to strengthen an idea you believe in and by doing so, inspire readers to investigate for themselves and come to their own conclusions.

Harris writes about four ways in which you can forward a text: illustrating, authorizing, borrowing, and extending. What I took away from reading about these four methods in detail is quite simple. If you are using another text as an example (whether by illustration, authorization, borrowing, or extending) don’t use an example just to use an example. You must use a relevant example to strengthen and reinforce what you already have.

I think blogs are an excellent example of forwarding texts. Usually, blogs are not the place people go to find breaking news that is the job of the news. However, a blogger will take a particular news story and use it to continue the conversation on that topic. A blog could potentially have more background to the story or will have an opinion on the matter. Another way blogs forward texts is that often blogs will have links you can click for additional information or related stories thus continuing that initial conversation that started it all.