After reading the first part of the Harris book, Rewriting, I found that I could relate to him a little. All throughout high school we would have to read a book by a certain time and then we would usually have to write an essay on it afterwards. During my junior year we had to read a short story by Edgar Allan Poe titled, The Fall of the House of Usher, which contained a lot of symbolism. After we got through discussing it I didn't know that a book could contain that much symbolism. Almost every little detail meant something. So we had to write an essay in which we had to explain all of this symbolism and critique this short story by Edgar Allan Poe.
Even in my math class senior year, we had to critique the statistical articles that other people wrote. We had to find a certain amount of articles from the Internet and the newspaper or a magazine. We wrote our own short essays about how well the information was gathered and if it could be trusted. We had to write about they people who performed the experiments and if the procedure was done correctly.
So I guess I have already done some of the things Harris talks about in his book. I had to cite all of my quotes that I used so I guess I know how to cite sources correctly. But I never had to write five pages on just one topic.
1 comment:
Sounds like you had a good amount of experience with working with others' texts in high school. That's very cool. What I especially like about Harris, though, is that he situates practices of citation, of using others' works, in what it allows us to do. I like the idea that creativity results from the engagement with other voices and ideas. Takes some of the pressure off of having to be a completely original genius!
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