Joseph Harris explains his view on writing in his first two chapters of his book Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. He explains that academic writing is usually a response to previous people’s work; and in creating those responses, people note limitations, add to, or doubt the work that they are responding to by adding those ideas with their work. Harris believes that the job of academic writing is to rework and expand knowledge to any topic. Also, to Harris, academic writing serves as a social practice. Many connections can be made between Sullivan and Harris. Sullivan responds to different topics through his blog, and in turn gets immediate reaction and responses from other people. Sullivan sees the immediate reactions as the beauty of blogging, just as Harris sees responding and adding new ideas to a conversation through writing as the beauty of our culture. In combining both of these ideas, we can put Harris’s purpose for writing with Sullivan’s use of a blog and create a semi-perfect combination for writing. By doing so, we can draw on new information, get immediate feedback, and stick to the purpose of writing which is to respond and add new ideas to the topic of discussion. I only considered this method semi-perfect though, because we still can run into difficulties like inaccurate information or alienating a part of an audience that does not use technology daily like many of us do. Although the blogging system has limitations, it creates a whole new way to share ideas.
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