Harris's View On Writing

In Harris’s book on writing, he focuses more on the kind of writing done for academic purposes rather than just writing for you. It’s the kind of writing that has already been written by somebody else, but now a student must rewrite to satisfy their own needs of the information. He talks about things such as citing and not plagiarizing but those are not his main points. He mostly talks about how you can take someone else’s writing, make it into your own words, and still have the same meaning as it did before. Chapter 1 is called coming to terms, and by coming to terms Harris means exactly what I said in the sentence before, taking someone else’s work and writing it in your own language without losing its meaning. He uses a quote from an essay by Robert Coles, and in the essay William Carlos Williams says “Who’s against shorthand? No one I know. Who wants to be shortchanged? No one I know.” What this means to me is when you are looking at someone else’s writing and looking to write something using that information, it’s hard to summarize the writing without it losing its meaning.
It is hard to find connections between Sullivan’s writing and Harris’s book on writing because I feel like they are both talking about writing, but completely opposite styles of it. Harris is talking about essays which someone is usually forced to do, while Sullivan is talking about blogs which someone does because they want to. But there were a few connections to be found. But they can be connected in the fact that when doing a blog, you write about something that interests you and you may look up some information on the topic you are talking about. To put this information in your blog you have to make it into your own language which is what Harris talks about. Also, Harris mentions how there will be meanings in your text that you didn’t mean to put there. In blogging, that can happen a lot more than in academic writing because there is no editor to go over the writing and catch that stuff. It would be a lot easier to accidentally post something that can be easily taken out of context in a blog.