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.
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