Harris vs. Sullivan

After reading Jacob Harris's introduction, it seems to me that he wants writing to lose its' stigma of being this strict, old-school, academic-based undertaking, to being more of a realisic, appealing, and approachable process, much like the process of blogging. He wants people to realize that writing can be fun and everyone can do it. Specifically, he focuses on the process of working with texts, or reading and then rewriting them in your own words. This is his main concern throughout the first chapter of his book and coincidentally, my main concern as I write this blog post. He urges the reader to question the text at hand and decipher what its' writer is atually trying to do with the text. That is, he wants us to analyze the ideas behind the ideas, if that makes sense. Harris writes that "a text always says both less and more than its writer intends," and so it is our job, as educated readers, to fill in the gaps with our own writings.

This act, essentially, is what blogging does. As Andrew Sullivan mentioned in his article, blogging is a more personal, free-form style of writing that allows someone to think out loud. And further, a blogging community is a perfect place for the sharing and discussing of ideas to ignite our thinking. In many ways, bloggers are the kind of expert academic readers that Harris describes. They analyze texts, turn them into something personal, and get at the core of their message. While I think both Harris and Sullivan would agree that blogging is a form of writing, I am willing to propose that blogging is perhaps writing in its truest form.