The way I see it, Harris defines “countering” as arguing your own ideas in a polite manner. Harris makes it clear that countering is not engaging in a fight to the death debate to find out who is right and who is wrong. Countering means to introduce a new idea into a conversation. According to Harris the goal of countering is “not to refute what has been said before, to bring the discussion to the end, but to respond to prior views in ways that move the conversation in new directions” (Harris 56).
One method to countering Harris discusses is to take the original author’s words and acknowledge what the author is trying to convey before you can refute it. Harris writes “To identify what a text fails to do, you need to be clear about what it achieves…” (Harris 57). When countering a certain author, you must first make sense of what the author is trying to say, whether you agree with it or not. By coming to terms with the original text, you can write a more compelling counter argument.
I think Harris defines countering not as being defensive or aggressive about a certain topic, but offering a critique of what another author has previously written.
I see countering sometimes in the Huffington Post’s Healthy Living blog when bloggers take new research to debunk nutrition or health myths that have been around for a while. They take the ideas that already exist and put a new perspective on them. These new ideas are always more convincing when there is scientific to back them up.
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