The Art of Rewriting

As I was reading the first two chapters of Rewriting, I found a lot of good points that Joseph Harris made in terms of the way you read, write, and comment on other's writing. For example, reading is not all about just understanding the material, but about interpreting and comprehending it in your own context, which is a firm standard of academic writing. Commenting on another's writing is used in tangent with your own ideas, in a way that helps add more depth or a new perspective to the text. And while this is a very common aspect of academic writing, you must be careful to not interpret the text in a way that is what you wanted to hear in the first place. This defeats the purpose of reading another's writings, and adds no more insight to the ideas of the original author. These ideas also apply to Sullivan and the concept of blogging. Sullivan's job is to comment on events and idea's in a way that will help the public understand what's going on in a way that adds an opinion or outside view to what is going on. If Sullivan merely read the article and commented on it without any recognition of the actual article, no depth would have been added to the event. This is a crucial part of "rewriting", as Harris states. Blogging, in a sense, is a rewriting of past occurrences or ideas, read by other people who can then comment in their own way. This adds a completely new dimension of depth to the ideas.