Harris Vs. Sullivan

In Jospeh Harris’s Rewriting, he describes academic reading and writing as an unoriginal piece of text. Harris shows that academic writing is always “in response to the work of other” (1). Because all academic writing in some form or another is based off of a different piece of work Harris calls writing rewriting. To Harris rewriting is not just simply restating a previous work but it is the job of the writer to “add something to what is being talked about” (2). Writing has to use other works as a launch pad for taking the subject to the next level. Harris believes that to be a good writer one must “draw quickly on terms and ideas from other thinkers” (16). Harris states that reading is one of the precursors to rewriting in that “what intellectuals have to say is bound up inextricably with the books [they] are reading” (2). Harris only talks about reading and writing in the intellectual field. It seems that he it almost saying that there are really no original ideas and the ideas that we come up with we get from reading others’ works and when writing we don’t come up with our own ideas but simply build off someone else’s.

            Comparing Harris’s text to Sullivan’s text would be like comparing apples to oranges. Harris focuses on intellectual writing while Sullivan writes about his free form blogging. I agree with Harris that intellectual writing does, for the most part, build off the ideas of other. Sullivan, however, was not talking about intellectual writing. It could be argued that he was talking about un-intellectual writing. Blogging is about freedom from format and requirements and writing about what you actually feel without the restriction of the intellectual world. I feel that Sullivan and Harris have opposite definitions of writing.