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.