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).