Putting in Your Oar...

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion has begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone on before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending on the quality of your ally’s assistance. The hour grows late, you must depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

Academic Writing as Conversation

Academic writing is often compared to a conversation because each author is responding to ideas others wrote or “said” before. Each new piece of writing is like a turn in the conversation. Harris says the conversation metaphor “hints at the more civil tone of much academic work. A dialogue is not a debate. You don’t win a conversation, you add to it, push it ahead, keep it going…” (36). To describe a number of moves that academic writers make when they take concepts, ideas, or images from one text and use them for their own purposes, Joseph Harris coined the term forwarding. The word comes from email terminology: “If you reply to an email post you have received, you are engaging in a private correspondence. If you forward that post (or part of it) to another set of readers, along with your comments on it, you have begun a more public exchange” (36-37). So, forwarding involves taking “terms and concepts from one text and [applying] them to a reading of other texts or situations” (6). In coming to terms with a text, you were “replying to” Scholes project. In forwarding a text, you use their ideas for your own project. By showing how their work can be applied, you add to the larger conversation surrounding the ideas. Much of academic discourse thus tends to proceed sideways, as writers take ideas and phrases from what they have read and reuse them in approaching a different set of issues or texts (your own project).

As the email metaphor implies, you cannot effectively forward a text without first coming to terms with it (thus, you must first provide a generous and fair reading of the text you are forwarding, since the effectiveness of your juicy claim in some real way depends on the words, images, or ideas the text you are forwarding).

Harris suggests four different ways that writers forward the work of others. The first 2 you probably know, the second 2 are new ones we’ll use in writing the formal paper.

Move #1: Illustrating

Illustrating is when you use scenes, incidents, stories, or images from another text to illustrate a point you want to make. For instance, Scholes illustrates his point about ideological narratives by re-presenting a Budweiser commercial, an ideal example that helps him make his case. In English 101, we will often talk about the “10 on 1” principle: in college writing, it’s usually better to make 10 points about 1 idea than to make merely 1 point and bore readers with 10 different examples. Scholes only uses a single Budweiser commercial to illustrate his argument, but he makes several interesting points about the importance of performing ideological criticism on popular culture texts through this one example. Beware falling into the “1 on 10” trap in your writing. Don’t illustrate the same point over and over: “And another example is. . .” It’s also problematic if you simply prove the author’s same point in your own paper. For instance, when you are forwarding, don’t just think of another commercial to make the same points Scholes made about the Budweiser commercial. It’s a useful exercise to practice doing close reading of a visual text, but you aren’t adding anything new to the conversation, just another example.

Move #2: Authorizing

Authorizing is when you invoke the expertise or status of another writer to support your thinking. For example, “Scholes, a professor at Brown University and leading expert in the field of cultural and media studies, in also concerned with the subliminal effect of visual texts…” Authorizing is the traditional way you probably already know to use a source (perhaps you can think of this move as a written ‘shout out’ that gives you additional credibility).
As Harris explains, we authorize by using the concepts and arguments of others to show that we are informed and know what we are talking about. We demonstrate to readers that our argument is not simply a “personal opinion” because others have noted it too. Harris admits this move is a “straightforward and routine form of intellectual housekeeping” (44). Perhaps you’ve been taught that the whole reason to use sources is to “back up” what you write. Sometimes it is. In the social sciences, authorizing is expected, to show that you are “authorized to speak” by knowing the experts and citing a string of names in the parentheses. But authorizing is only one way to use sources. In the humanities, original interpretation is valued more, so if you over-rely on authorizing, readers might wish you had developed your own argument instead of repeating what others have said.

Move #3: Borrowing

Borrowing is when you draw on terms or concepts from other authors to think through your own subject. In this instance, you are not using these authors to support your work, but to advance it. When you borrow, you “rewrite” a concept for your own purposes, you keep the borrowed term or idea and apply it elsewhere. For instance, I could borrow Sholes’s concept of “reading a visual text” for its ideological meaning and “read” an event like a marriage ceremony for the ideological meaning embedded in the ritual.

Example of Borrowing

In the past few years, we have been learning that the computer is the technology of the future. We are told that our children will fail in school and be left behind in life if they are not “computer literate.” We are told that we cannot run our businesses, or compile our shopping lists, or keep our checkbooks tidy unless we own a computer. Perhaps some of this is true. But the most important fact about computers and what they mean to our lives is that we learn from about all this from television. Television has achieved the status of a “meta-medium”- an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well.

At the same time, television has achieved the status of “myth,” as Roland Barthes uses the word. He means by myth a way of understanding the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious of, that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible. That is now the way of television. We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by its machinery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confine our television sets to special rooms.

Move #4: Extending

Extending is when you “put your own spin on” the term or concept that you take from another text. Here, you are doing more than borrowing—you are changing (somewhat) the meaning of the concept. You are not criticizing the author’s concept, you are adding to its meaning or use. Extending another person’s ideas can be risky. You have to be careful that you don’t mis-appropriate their ideas.

If the stylistic signature of borrowing from another text is the note of acknowledgment (“in the words of x,” “as y suggests,” “as z uses the term”), then the characteristic marker of extending is the punning echo or substituted term (adding to the range of meanings by quoting with a difference). For example, in order to add to the ways that you could use the concept of “visual fascination” you might extend the possible uses of Scholes term by by coining your own phrase in relation that riffs off of the origin, such as “visual absorption” or “bodily fascination.”

Example of Extending

Joseph Addison’s essay “On Genius, published in The Spectator in 1711, laid out the terrain of genius as we use the term today, to denote exceptional talent or someone who possesses it. According to Addison, there are two kinds of genius- natural and learned… In general terms this dichotomy- brilliant vs. industrious- still underlies our notion of genius today, but despite Thomas Edison’s oft quoted adage, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” it’s the inspiration we dote on.

Adapting, Not Adopting

Illustrating and authorizing are not as sophisticated as the other two kinds of forwarding. When writers borrow or extend ideas, they don’t just “lift” them from their original context and plop them down unchanged into a new context. They do something with them. And that gets more interesting. Harris argues “that writing tends to become more exciting as it moves outward—selecting, excerpting, commenting, and sometimes, changing or inflecting the meanings of the texts it brings forward” (46).

It's Complicated

It’s important to note that writers rarely use these strategies in isolation from one another, but in multiple and overlapping ways. Borrowing and extending often go together. We borrow a concept and then add to its range of meanings. With borrowing, writers make use of another person’s term /concept/theory, but in a new context; in the process, they often extend its meanings as well. Harris puts it this way: “You give a text its due and [then] show the [new] uses you make of it” (48).