second essay roughdraft

here's the roughdraft of the second essay.

The "Death Panel"

Does the RNC Want to Kill Granny?

After reading the article on death panels from the New York Times, I noticed the post above, "Does the RNC Want to Kill Granny?", on Daily Kos about the RNC's insurance plan, end-of-life consultations and death panels and thought it (as well as the discussion/comments posted there) was a pretty interesting addition to the topic if anyone is interested.

Taking an Approach in Writing

Harris’ idea of “taking an approach” seems more complex than the previous ways of rewriting: coming to terms, forwarding, and countering. It is also more difficult to notice in other’s writing because it isn’t as straight forward as the others. Its almost hidden within the style of writing. In his exact words, taking an approach is “working in the mode of another writer.” Three ways of positioning your own work to other writers are acknowledging influences, turning an approach on itself, and reflexivity.
To acknowledge influences in writing, the way of writing and thinking of the influential author is described, rather than describing the author himself. Also, showing how your writing style differs from theirs, though borrowing their style, is important. Turning an approach on itself is “[taking] both your subject and method of analysis from the texts you are working with.” This involves applying the author’s own views to their work. A method of taking an approach that is less about the writing characteristics of the other writer and more about the choices in taking an approach that you make is reflexivity. Reflexive moves in writing acknowledge how your writing has changed based on outside influences.
In my opinion, the New York Times doesn’t really “take an approach” in the sense of acknowledging any outside influence on the style of writing because literally noting an writing style influence in a news article would be rather odd and hard, if not impossible, to pull off. The Artblog has few posts that are written from a personal perspective that would allow for rewriting by “taking an approach.”

Countering "Intellectual Recession"

This post stood out to me while I was looking through my old post titles for one to revisit because the title “Intellectual Recession” and the basic idea behind it seemed a little extreme. I think at the time I was trying to come up with a strong position on the topic so I could have something interesting to write about without truly thinking over what my position was.

"I’ve never looked at something as common and widely used as the internet as a possible cause for the slow “intellectual recession” America is experiencing due to the simple lack of a real need for Carr’s idea of literacy in modern America. Everything is so simplified and altered now that our values, like, as said by Carr, “the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable” are becoming much less common."

I don't necessarily agree with all of this statement. Though we may seem to be more "simple" because we can now so easily access information without having to truly use much thought, I think we still have the same abilities in our thinking, we are just somewhat more lazy about it, only doing this when we really have to. Today’s technology and society have made it very easy to not have to think for ourselves and sort of go with the flow, so it may seem that we are slowly losing the ability of deep or complex thought, but in reality we might just be using it less often.

While we don’t use the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, we are doing it in a different way, one based off of the availability of the entire world of knowledge at our fingertips, whenever we want.

Harris' Countering

Harris’ discussion of countering focused more on how to continue an exchange of ideas between two opposing views rather than how to merely prove the opponent wrong. He presents an example of when he realized how to effectively counter an oppenent in academic writing at the beginning of the chapter. A professor that critiqued his work said that he had simply tried to prove his opponent wrong throughout the entire paper without successfully developing a quality counter to his opponent’s work. To do this he suggests three tactics to use for developing a position of your own: arguing the other side, uncovering values, and dissenting.

He presents a question that he created to assist him with preparing a quality counter after describing his thoughts on his professor’s reaction to his paper in graduate school: “The question I’ve learned to ask myself at such times is: What do I hope will result from pursuing this disagreement? If the answer is simply that I think I can prove that the text I am reading has certain shortcomings or limits, then I try to set aside the temptation to argue.”

On one of the blogs I have been following, Daily Kos, I read a post titled ‘What Is That Orange Guy Talking About?’ that uses countering. The Minority Leader of the House, John Boehner has been persuading the Democrats to make some promises involving the health insurance reform bill. First, the post questions if Boehner may have a point, but continues on to say that, in their opinion, he shouldn’t be pursuing the issue:

"But does Boehner have a point in insisting that the floor managers, who are the chairs of the three committees with jurisdiction over the bill, and therefore will likely be the main conferees in the part of the House, can speak with some authority on what's likely to happen in conference, and could even commit if they wanted to to voting in support of the House's official position on the amendment? Sure.
Does that entitle him to such a commitment? Absolutely not."

These questions use the 'arguing the other side' tactic for countering by presenting both sides, though only one side is strengthened throughout the rest of the post.

The Beat Always Goes On

So I realize that it may be a little late to finally be giving my blog a proper name, but better late than never, I guess. Plus, "english 105" was just too boring...and things like renaming your blog are great ways to spend time when you're bored at work and putting off much more doing productive things like, oh let's say...reading Harris' 'Countering'.
I was looking for a new name by looking through some old posts and trying to find a good theme when I read the post on Sullivan's 'Why I Blog' and remembered my favorite analogy that Sullivan made in this article between bloggers and disk jockeys:

There are times, in fact, when a blogger feels less like a writer than an online disc jockey, mixing samples of tunes and generating new melodies through mashups while also making his own music. He is both artist and producer—and the beat always goes on.

Forwarding in Blogs

Harris presents his idea of forwarding as “taking words, images, or ideas from [a text] and putting them to use in new contexts.” He gave a great metaphor by Kenneth Burke of forwarding and a conversation: you arrive in the middle of an intense conversation, catch on to the topic and arguments, add your own thoughts, debate for a while, then leave while the conversation continues.


The Artblog uses forwarding in nearly every post they make and have made because the posts involves images other artists’ work and Harris defines forwarding as including using images. Most of the posts on this blog are about new works, exhibits and art fairs, so they have images of the artwork to give the reader a better idea of the nature of the artwork. Sometimes the “forwarding” of images of the art can alter it because the photographs of the actual art can affect the way the artwork looks. The overall idea of the art remains the same though.


Daily Kos uses forwarding by spreading political news, as in posting quotes from political figures. Also, authors on this blog use links and ideas from other posts and readings in their own posts, therefore forwarding ideas from others and using them in new contexts. When quoting political figures in posts, sometimes the meaning is skewed a little (from the intended meaning) to fit the author’s purpose.