Joe Harris speaks about Rewriting

On Monday, November 29th, Duke University professor and author of the book Rewriting: How to do Things With Texts, Joe Harris came to talk to students about the purpose and practicality of his book, as well as the ways in which his moves can vastly improve your ability to write academic papers. Being previously acquainted with the book, it was incredibly interesting for me to see which moves Harris felt were the most important in his technique. Interestingly, his first move, Coming to Terms, is what Harris thought was the most challenging and most important for a writer.

Normally, people would think that the first step has to be the easiest, but for Harris, Coming to Terms is a process that occurs throughout writing, and is incorporated in many of his other moves. Coming to Terms is important, he claimed, because in order to write something truly new and special, you have to understand what has been said about it in the past and what you wish to say about it now.

It was also especially interesting to see Harris put these moves into goals for those of us at the workshop. He went about this by assigning activities for identifying moves in other works and asking ourselves to question the author's purpose for using that move as well as the effectiveness it has within the writing. For example, Harris had us read an excerpt from a student article about the film Gran Torino. We analyzed a section in which the author borrow the term "de cardio racism" from another author. This is clearly a form of forwarding, because she uses another author's concept to further support her own. By discussing works with us, Harris made it easier for us to identify the moves on our own. This in turn can help us write more effectively if we are able to see these moves in our own writing. Overall, I thought the activities were very helpful for identifying ways in which to view my own work and draw my attention to improving my writing.

The 11th Hour

On Monday, October 18th, students, faculty, and community members gathered in the Fine Arts building to watch a screening of the film The 11th Hour. This film, narrated by famous actor Leonardo DiCaprio, brings together scientists and experts from all corners of the globe to discuss the imminent problem of global warming. The documentary urges the viewer to take action in finding ways to protect our atmosphere before it's too late. One truly unique aspect of the film is that it utilizes more than just scientists in the discussion of the state of our planet. The 11th Hour interviewed politicians, scientists, environmental activists, Native Americans, and many others including physicist Steven Hawking, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, and journalist Paul Hawken, to name a few. Each person that they interviewed had a different area of expertise as well as a different view of the world. What was interesting, though, was that despite the differences between them, they could all see that the Earth is undergoing a rapid period of change, and that it's suffering because of it.

The final message of the film really resonated with me because after the experts showed the audience just how poorly we have treated our planet and ourselves, they provided a number of potential solutions to the problem. What struck me so much was that the solution was not simply to abandon technology and return to nature, but to encourage technology to impact the environment in a positive way. It postulates ways of creating entire cities that run on renewable energy from the sun as well as many other ways to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. the film is a powerful use of discourse that is used to affect change in everyday life.