Countering

Joseph Harris explains what he means by countering, and this gives us interesting ways to use sources in our essays. For this essay please choose a new topic to research, such as an issue, controversy, or theory. Try to persuade readers by using ideas from sources to make an argument. In particular, counter your source(s) the way Harris describes. You will also need to forward and/or come to terms with sources in order to achieve your purpose.

Your essay should be 6 to 7 pages, typed and double spaced. State your purpose directly. Position yourself in response to at least one of your sources, and integrate additional source information as you develop your argument. Use MLA documentation in the body of your essay and in your list of sources at the end.

Introduction

of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in criti-

cal articles and reviews.

—U.S. copyright notice

A text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cul-

tures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody,

contestation.

—Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”

My aim in this book is to help you make interesting use of the texts you read in the essays you write. How do you respond to the work of others in a way that is both generous and assertive?
How do you make their words and

thoughts part of what you want to

say? In the academy you will often

be asked to situate your thoughts

about a text or an issue in relation

to what others have written about

it. Indeed, I’d argue that this inter-

play of ideas defi nes academic writ-

ing—that whatever else they may

do, intellectuals almost always write

in response to the work of others.

Intertexts
As Jonathan Culler writes: “Liter-
ary works are not to be considered
autonomous entities, ‘organic
wholes,’ but as intertextual con-
structs: sequences which have
meaning in relation to other texts
which they take up, cite, parody,
refute, or generally transform.” The
Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, NY: Cornel
University Press, 1981), 38.

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2 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

(Literary theorists call this aspect of writing intertextuality.) But to respond

is to do more than to recite or ventriloquize; we expect a respondent to add

something to what is being talked about. The question for an academic

writer, then, is how to come up with this something else, to add to what has

already been said.

My advice here is to imagine yourself as rewriting—as drawing from,

commenting on, adding to—the work of others. Almost all academic es-

says and books contain within them the visible traces of other texts—in the

form of notes, quotations, citations, charts, fi gures, illustrations, and the

like. This book is about the writing that needs to go on around these traces,

about what you need to do to make the work of others an integral part of

your own thinking and writing. This kind of work often gets talked about

in ways—avoiding plagiarism, documenting sources, citing authorities, ac-

knowledging infl uences—that make it seem a dreary and legalistic concern.

But for me this misses the real excitement of intellectual writing—which is

the chance to engage with and rewrite the work of other thinkers. The job

of an intellectual is to push at and question what has been said before, to re-

think and reinterpret the texts he or she is dealing with. More than anything

else, then, I hope in this book to encourage you to take a stance toward the

work of others that, while generous and fair, is also playful, questioning,

and assertive.

This has led some readers to ask why I’ve chosen a term like rewriting to

describe this sort of active and critical stance. And, certainly, I hope it’s clear

that the kind of rewriting I value has nothing to do with simply copying or

reciting the work of others. Quite the contrary. My goal is to show you some

ways of using their texts for your purposes. The reason I call this rewriting is

to point to a generative paradox of academic work: Like all writers, intellec-

tuals need to say something new and say it well. But unlike many other writ-

ers, what intellectuals have to say is bound up inextricably with the books

we are reading, the movies we are watching, the music we are listening to,

and the ideas of the people we are talking with. Our creativity thus has its

roots in the work of others—in response, reuse, and rewriting.

Rewriting is also a usefully specifi c and concrete word; it refers not

to a feeling or idea but to an action. In this book I approach rewriting as

what the ethnographer Sylvia Scribner has called a social practice: the use of

Harris, Joseph. Rewriting : How To Do Things With Texts, Utah State University Press, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Introduction 3

certain tools (paper, pen, computer)

in a well-defi ned context (the acad-

emy) to achieve a certain end or

make a particular product (a criti-

cal essay). There are practices in all

walks of life—ways of farming and

gardening, of working with leather

or wood, of interviewing clients and counseling patients, of teaching and

coaching, of designing and engineering, of setting up labs and conducting

experiments. A practice describes how the members of a particular craft or

trade get their work done. A problem with many books on writing, it seems

to me, is that they fail to imagine their subject in meaningful terms as such

a practice. Instead, they tend to alternate between offering advice that is

specifi c but trivial—about proofreading or copyediting, for instance—and

exhortations that are as earnest as they are vague. Or at least I have never

felt sure that I knew what I was actually being asked to do when called upon

to “think critically” or to “take risks” or to “approach revision as re-vision.”

But by looking here at academic writing as a social practice, as a set of strat-

egies that intellectuals put to use in working with texts, I hope to describe

some of its key moves with a useful specifi city.

Much of my thinking about writing hinges on this idea of a move. My

subtitle alludes to one of the quirkiest and most intriguing books I have

ever read, the philosopher J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. In

this book, actually the notes from a series of lectures, Austin argues that in

thinking about language his fellow philosophers have long been overcon-

cerned with decoding the precise meaning or truth value of various state-

ments—a fi xation that has blinded them from considering the routine yet

complex ways in which people use words to get things done: to marry, to

promise, to bet, to apologize, to persuade, to contract, and the like. Austin

calls such uses of language performatives and suggests that it is often more

useful to ask what a speaker is trying to do in saying something than what

he or she means by it.

While I don’t try to apply Austin’s thinking here in any exact way, I

do think of myself as working in his mode—as trying to show how to do

things with texts, to shift our talk about writing away from the fi xed and

Intertexts
Sylvia Scribner, “The Practice of
Literacy,” in Mind and Social Prac-
tice (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1997), 190–205.

4 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

static language of thesis and struc-

ture and toward a more dynamic

vocabulary of action, gesture, and

response. You move in tandem with

or in response to others, as part of

a game or dance or performance or

conversation—sometimes toward

a goal and sometimes just to keep

the ball in play or the talk going,

sometimes to win and sometimes to

contribute to the work of a group. I

hope in this book to describe intel-

lectual writing as such a fl uid and

social activity and to offer you some

strategies, some moves as a writer,

for participating in it.

To do so, I draw on my experiences over the last twenty years as a writer

and teacher of academic writing. And so, while this book is fi lled with ex-

amples of intellectuals at work with texts, they are examples that perhaps, in

the end, tell as much about my own tastes, training, and values as anything

else. That is to say, in this book I use my own ways of responding to and

working with texts, my own habits of reading and writing, as representa-

tive of what other academics and intellectuals do. The drawback of such

an approach, I suspect, is not that it is likely to be idiosyncratic but the re-

verse—that I may end up simply rehashing the common sense, the accepted

practices, of a particular group of writers. But that is also, in a way, my goal:

to show you some of the moves that academics routinely make with texts, to

articulate part of “what goes without saying” about such work.

The Structure of This Book

Each of the chapters in this book centers on a particular rewriting move:

coming to terms, forwarding, countering, taking an approach, and revising.

But these fi ve moves do not by any means compose a fi xed sequence for

writing a critical essay. On the contrary, I am sure that as you work on dif-

ferent pieces, you will fi nd yourself using these moves in varying ways and

Intertexts
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with
Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1962).

What I fi nd of particular interest
to my work here is a moment, near
the very end of his lectures, when
Austin offers a short list of what
he calls “expositive” verbs—those
that are used in “the expound-
ing of views, the conducting of
arguments, and the clarifying of
usages and references”—in effect,
beginning to outline his own set of
“moves” for academic writing (see
pp. 161 63).

Introduction 5

for shifting reasons—sometimes making several moves almost at once and

other times focusing on a particular use of a text, sometimes making sus-

tained use of a certain move and other times not employing it at all. I have

ordered the chapters of this book, however, to suggest a kind of ethics of

academic writing, a sense that intellectual work both starts and ends in ac-

knowledging the strengths of other perspectives. And so I begin with what

might be called the generous aspects of working with texts before turning to

more critical forms of rewriting.

In chapter 1, I suggest some strategies for coming to terms with com-

plex texts, for re-presenting the work of others in ways that are both fair to

them and useful to your own aims in writing. In a sense, this is rewriting

in its clearest form. For as soon as you begin to say what you think a text is

“about” you are involved in rewriting it, in translating its language into your

own. But how do you offer the gist of an ambitious, complex, and perhaps

quite long text in the space of a few paragraphs or sentences? How do you

select certain phrases or ideas for emphasis? When do you quote and when

do you paraphrase? For while the point of academic writing is never merely

to explain what someone else has said, to respond to others you need also

to offer an accurate account of their work, one that respects its strengths as

well as notes its limits. Effective use begins in generous understanding.

In chapter 2, I look more closely at such questions of use—specifi cally,

at strategies for forwarding the projects of others. I borrow the term forward

from the language of email because I think it describes better than respond

what writers most often actually do with other texts. For outside of a few

situations (teaching, editing, personal letters), readers seldom respond di-

rectly to a writer with comments on his or her text (“Dear Mr. Shakespeare

. . .”). They are instead more likely to forward their thoughts about that text

for a group of other readers—the teachers and students in a course, per-

haps, or the readers of a journal or magazine or website—much as email

users often resend posts that they think will interest certain friends and col-

leagues, usually with a set of carats (>) or a vertical line marking off the

original text from their own comments. Anyone who has participated in a

listserv knows how complicated and layered such posts can grow, as mem-

bers insert remarks and delete passages before reforwarding a post back to

the group, often resulting in a palimpsest of comments upon comments

6 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

upon comments upon an original post. While I don’t want to push this anal-

ogy too far, I do want to hold onto the idea of academic writing as involving

this sort of ongoing recirculation of texts. As I use the term, then, a writer

forwards the views of another when he or she takes terms and concepts from

one text and applies them to a reading of other texts or situations. The most

important questions to ask a writer at such points often have less to do with

the text being read than with the uses being made of it. In coming to terms

with a text, your focus lies on understanding and representing its argument.

In forwarding a text, you seek to extend the range and power of its ideas and

phrasings. In this sense, the fi rst two chapters sketch out ways of reading

with an author, of rewriting as building upon the work of others.

Chapter 3 offers a mirror image of this emphasis, suggesting ways of

reading against the grain of a text, of rewriting as a way of countering ideas

and phrasings that strike you as somehow mistaken, troubling, or incom-

plete. I don’t explore here the (limited) dynamics of pro-and-con debates,

of writing whose aim is to simply to prove why someone else is foolish or

wrong. For such work aims not at rewriting but erasure. Instead, I look

at some of the ways you can develop what you have to say as a writer by

thinking through the limits and problems of other views and texts. Such

work involves more than shouting down an opponent or fi nding ways of

discounting her or his arguments; an effective counterstatement must at-

tend closely to the strengths of the position it is responding to, and thus

in many ways depends on representing that position clearly and fairly in

order to make full sense. The characteristic stance of the counterstatement

is “ Yes, but . . .”. This sort of rewriting—in which a writer aims less to refute

or negate than to rethink or qualify—seems to me one of the key moves of

intellectual discourse.

Projects

Identifying Writerly Moves

See if you can locate texts that offer examples of the fi rst

three rewriting moves that I describe here: coming to terms,

forwarding and countering. (You may fi nd a single text that

offers examples of two or more of these moves.) Mark those

Introduction 7

moments in the text where you see the writer making these

moves, and be ready to talk about what you see him or her

as doing.

You may also want to see if you can fi nd instances of

writers making moves with other texts that my terms don’t

seem to describe very well. What other terms might you

offer in their place?

I then turn in chapter 4 to a form of rewriting that is at once generous

and critical, in which you adopt, extend, and rework the driving questions

and concerns of another writer. In taking an approach, you do not merely

make use of a particular insight or concept from another writer (as in for-

warding) but draw on his or her distinctive style or mode of working. This

form of rewriting often involves applying a theory or method of analysis

advanced by another writer to a new set of issues or texts. But you can also

build on the insights of another writer, ask the sort of questions she might

ask, draw on her characteristic uses of words and ideas, adapt her style of

thought and writing to the demands of your own project—in ways that are

at once more subtle and powerful. In this chapter I offer some strategies for

working assertively in the mode of another writer, of taking an approach

and making it your own.

Coming to terms, forwarding, countering, and taking an approach de-

scribe four ways of rewriting the work of others. In chapter 5 I suggest that

you can also make use of these four moves in returning to and rewriting

your own work-in-progress—a move that teachers of writing have for some

time called revising. But while there has been much talk about the impor-

tance of revision, there has been little substantive advice on how to do it.

Scholars like Peter Elbow and Donald Murray have offered excellent advice

on drafting, on moving from nothing to something, getting words onto

a page or screen. Others like Joseph Williams and Richard Lanham have

written wonderful books on editing for style and clarity. But their focus has

centered on reworking the form of sentences and paragraphs. Much less has

been said about how to develop and revise a line of thinking over a series

of drafts. That is what I try to offer in the last chapter of this book—an

8 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

approach to revising that asks you

to question and rework your own

writing much as you might do with

the texts of others. How might you

summarize your own draft, come

to terms with what you have to say

in it? How do you defi ne your own

project in relation to those of the

texts you are discussing? At what

moments in your text do you most

clearly articulate your own line of

thinking? How might you extend or

forward this line? How might you

qualify or even counter it? In posing such questions, I hope to sketch a view

of revising as a systematic practice, a consistent set of moves that you can

apply to your own writing-in-progress.

As you will have noted by now, I have also interspersed two sorts of notes

throughout my text. The boxes marked Intertexts refer you to the reading that

underlies this book—both by providing bibliographic information about the

texts I use as examples and by acknowledging those writers and colleagues

who have helped me formulate my ideas about writing. The boxes marked

Projects gesture toward some of the uses I imagine that you might make of

this book, toward some possible ways of taking my approach and forward-

ing or countering it for your own purposes. What appears in these two sets

of boxes would usually be found in the notes, appendices, or bibliographies

of other books—that is, buried at the bottom of their pages or stuffed near

their back covers. But since my aim here is to illustrate how academic writers

reuse and respond to other texts, I thought it would be useful to make the

interplay of texts that animates this book a visible part of its pages.

What you won’t fi nd in the Projects boxes are conventional essay as-

signments. That’s because I hope that this book will be used in a course in

which you are already involved in reading and writing responses to other

texts—to academic books and articles, fi ction, movies, essays, plays, and the

like. My aim is not to replace that sort of work with this book but to help

you do it. Indeed, it seems to me that much as a piece of writing always

Intertexts
Peter Elbow, Writing with Power,
2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1998).

Donald Murray, A Writer Teaches
Writing, 2nd ed. (Boston: Heinle,
2003).

Joseph Williams, Style: Ten Les-
sons in Clarity and Grace, 7th ed.
(New York: Longman, 2002).

Richard Lanham, Revising Prose,
4th ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon,
1999).

Introduction 9

needs to be about something, so, too, a writing course needs a subject, to be

centered on some substantive issue or question—on the role of media in

society, for instance, or the nature of work, or theories of schooling, or any

of a thousand other complex and open issues that a group of writers can

explore together. A book like this cannot provide such a subject or focus.

Similarly, if a writing class is going to function as a class, this means that

its members need to share and discuss the work that they are all doing as

writers. Some readers have thus asked me why this book does not, until the

last chapter on revising, include examples of student texts. My answer is

that I hope that students using this book will look for such examples in the

texts they are themselves writing. The kind of writing course that I teach

brings three sets of texts to the table: (1) a group of readings that frame the

subject—media, work, schooling, and so on—that we will look at together

that semester; (2) the essays that students in the class draft and revise in re-

sponse to those readings; and (3) other texts that discuss writing itself. This

book is intended to fi t into that third category.

I have more to say about such matters in the afterword on teaching re-

writing. There I briefl y describe some courses I have taught, both in compo-

sition and literature, that aim to help students imagine themselves as critics

and intellectuals—that is, in which they are asked to read a wide range of

texts, to connect what they read to their own interests and concerns, and to

situate what they have to say in relation to the views of others. I describe

the kinds of readings I like to work with and the types of writing projects I

tend to assign. This afterword is addressed directly to teachers of academic

writing—and so if I were a student in course using this book, it would be

the fi rst section I turned to. But it is really no more a teacher’s guide than

the rest of Rewriting is a textbook; there are no answers in the back, simply

more ideas about writing and teaching.

Let me be as clear as I can about some other things that this book is not.

It is not a guide to research; there are many such books already, and some

very good ones, too. My concerns here begin at more or less the point when

research ends: when you are faced with the question of what to say about a

text that you have located or that you have been assigned to read. Neither do

I have much to tell you about documenting sources or avoiding plagiarism;

there are also plenty of handbooks that do that very well. And this is not a

10 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

guide to the conventions that struc-

ture writing in the academic disci-

plines; indeed, the kind of writing

that I talk about here is “academic”

only in the sense that it tends to be

taught in college. (If you are reading

this, you are probably doing so for

a course.) The sort of writing that

I am drawn to strives to be part of public life. It’s prose addressed not to

academic specialists but to general readers—the sort of writing you fi nd in

Harper’s and the Atlantic and the Nation, or in Rolling Stone and McSwee-

ney’s and Salon, as well as in independent weeklies, little magazines, student

journals, some political and cultural blogs and websites, and the like. It’s

what I will often call here intellectual prose—with the caveat that by intellec-

tual I don’t mean wonkish or bohemian. I am interested in a kind of writing

about texts and ideas, culture and politics, that while often associated with

the academy, is not confi ned to it, that seeks instead to address a broader

and more public set of issues and readers.

Projects

Coming to Terms with Rewriting

One way of coming to terms with a text is to make a

list of its key terms and concepts and then to try to defi ne

them in your own words. (I will have more to say about

such strategies in the fi rst chapter.) As a way of articulating

your own sense of what this book seems to be about, then,

jot down at least four or fi ve terms—excluding the titles of

chapters—that strike you as important to my project here

as a writer. Then see if you can write a paragraph in which

you use those terms in describing the aims of this book (as

best as you can now tell). You may want to return to this

paragraph after you’ve fi nished reading this book—not so

much to check your understanding of my work as to see if I

have managed to achieve what I set out to do as writer.

Intertexts
Wayne C. Booth, Gregory C. Co-
lomb, and Joseph M. Williams of-
fer an excellent guide to The Craft
of Research, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Introduction 11

Finally, I need say something about two other terms that are central

to this book—one a specialized term and the other a word so familiar that

some of its meanings have been dulled by use. The specialized term is text,

by which I simply mean an artifact that holds meaning for some readers,

viewers, or listeners. A book (or other piece of writing) is a text, but so

are movies, plays, songs, paintings, sculptures, photographs, cartoons, vid-

eos, billboards, advertisements, web pages, and the like—as well as objects

like buildings, cars, clothes, furniture, toys, games, and other gadgets when

they have somehow acquired meaning for their users. But not everything

is a text. Unlike actions, memories, or events, texts are objects that have

been made and designed—artifacts that can in some way be shelved, fi led,

or stored and then retrieved and reexamined. That is what makes them so

central to academic work. We may not agree on what a certain text means,

but we can return to it and try to point to those specifi c aspects—lines, im-

ages, phrases, scenes—that lead us to interpret it differently. Someone else

should always be able to check on how you have quoted a text.

The more commonplace but equally troublesome term is interest. I

have often heard teachers remark that describing a piece of writing as “in-

teresting” is to say very little about it, but I don’t think that this needs to be

the case. The critic Raymond Williams has shown how over time the word

interest has acquired several layers of meaning: Its fi rst recorded uses, in the

sixteenth century, appear in the realms of law and fi nance, as in the sense

of “holding an interest” in a company or “earning interest” from an invest-

ment. But early on the word also gained a more political or partisan sense,

as in the “interests of state,” “self-interest,” or “an interested party.” (The

opposite of this meaning is “disinterested,” like a judge.) But interest did

not gain its most current meaning,

of attracting curiosity or attention,

until the nineteenth century. (The

opposite here is “uninteresting” or

dull.) I fi nd all three of these mean-

ings useful in thinking about a piece

of writing. That is, you can ask of an

essay: (1) How does this writer add

interest or value to what has been

Intertexts
See Raymond Williams, Keywords:
A Vocabulary of Culture and So-
ciety, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 171 73,
as well as the usage notes for inter-
est in the online Oxford English
Dictionary.

12 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

said before? (2) What is her interest in this issue, what perspective is she

speaking for? and (3) How is her style in writing of interest or note? And

so when I say that my aim in this book is to help you make interesting use

of the work of others, I use the term in all three senses. I hope, that is, to

help you write with perspicacity and wit about texts and issues that matter

to you.

Projects

The Job of an Introduction

The test of an effective intro, then, is straightforward:

Does it offer readers a strong sense of your aim and plan

as a writer? Note that this question implies nothing about

the correct form of an introduction—about what should go

into fi rst paragraphs or where claims or theses should be

placed—and that is because the key issue here isn’t structure

but function. The point of an intro is to tell readers what is

at stake and what to expect in your writing. The question is

thus not what the proper form of an intro is but if it gets that

job done.

I encourage you to test this view against your own

reading. Look closely at the beginning pages of a number

of academic books or articles (including, perhaps, this one):

Are there any opening moves that all of the writers make?

If so, do they make these moves at similar moments or in

similar ways? And what changes from piece to piece? What

sorts of things do the writers do differently as each works to

defi ne a project and plan?

Coming to Terms

A few weeks ago my old friend Dick Lower sent me this huge pile of

paper, saying that, as I am a voracious collector of curios and such-

like, perhaps I should have it. . . . How is a mere chronicler such as

myself to transmute the lead of inaccuracy in these papers into the

gold of truth?

—Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean

so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be mas-

ter—that’s all.”

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

In his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges tells of an obscure modern artist who decides to rewrite a pas-sage from Don Quixote, the famous seventeenth-century novel by
Miguel de Cervantes. What makes this goal interesting, and more than a

little crazy, is that Menard doesn’t want simply to copy or transcribe the

Quixote but instead “to produce a number of pages which coincided—word

for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” And to

make matters even more diffi cult, he resolves to do so without referring

back to the text of the Quixote or conducting any research on Cervantes.

To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth
seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes,

14 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

and arriving thereby at the Quix-
ote—that looked to Menard less
challenging (and therefore less
interesting) than continuing to
be Pierre Menard and coming to
the Quixote through the experi-
ences of Pierre Menard.

It’s an absurd project, to write as your own part of a book that has already

been written by someone else, and one that the narrator of Borges’s story

(who seems no less eccentric than Menard) admits was never completed.

And yet, when the narrator rereads Don Quixote as though it were written

not by Cervantes but by his friend, he fi nds that while the two versions are

(of course) “verbally identical,” the one composed by Menard seems “almost

infi nitely richer”—since one is no longer reading a romantic novel from an-

other time and place but a contemporary text written as if it were such a

work. Why would someone write or read such an odd text? Well, as the nar-

rator observes, “ambiguity is richness.”

Projects

Rereading Borges

Read “Pierre Menard” with the aim of assessing my use

of it here. What aspects of this short fi ction do I emphasize?

What do I gloss over or omit? How might you add to or

counter my reading of Borges?

There are few things harder to do than to explain a joke without seeming

a bore, and I am aware that I have started this chapter by trying to do just

that. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” offers pleasures to its readers

that no summary can replicate, as Borges subtly and affectionately mocks

the wild ambitions of writers, the pretensions of critics, and the backstage

politics of the literary world. And certainly it’s hard to take either Menard or

his friend and biographer as seriously as they take themselves. But even still, I

think that for all its ironies, Borges’s story also hints at a theory of reading—

Intertexts
Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quixote,” in Collect-
ed Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley
(New York: Penguin, 1998), 88–95.

Coming to Terms 15

which is that to understand a text you need, in a way, to rewrite it, to take the

ideas and phrasings of its author and turn them into your own. Texts don’t

simply reveal their meanings to us; we need to make sense of them. Like

Menard, each of us comes at what we read through our own experiences and

concerns, and so each of us makes a slightly different sense of the texts we

encounter. We all write our own Quixote—at least to some degree. There is

no such thing as a completely accurate and objective summary, a view from

nowhere. All readings are interested (including my own here of Borges).

But if you cannot be neutral as a reader, you can strive to be fair and

self-refl ective. This is why I fi nd it helpful to think of the kind of rewrit-

ing in which you strive to represent the work of another, to translate the

language and ideas of a text into words of your own, as a coming to terms—

since, among other things, the phrase suggests a settling of accounts, a ne-

gotiation between reader and writer. In coming to terms, you need both to

give a text its due and to show what uses you want to make of it. You are not

simply re-presenting a text but incorporating it into your own project as a

writer. You thus need not only to explain what you think it means but to say

something about the perspective from which you are reading it. In coming

to terms with the work of others, then, you also say a good deal about who

you are as a writer, about your own interests and values.

Of course, the idea of coming to terms also emphasizes that we are deal-

ing here with words, with connecting your language to that of the texts you

are reading. Such work involves a dialectic between paraphrase and quota-

tion. On the one hand, to make strong use of the work of another writer,

you need to be able to restate what she or he has to say in your own terms,

to offer your own paraphrase of her or his project. On the other hand, you

also need to attend closely to the specifi c features of the texts you deal with,

to note and respect their key moves and phrasings—or you run the risk of

turning every text you read into a version of what you already want to say.

In coming to terms with a text by another writer, then, it seems to me

that you need to make three moves:

• Defi ne the project of the writer in your own terms.

• Note keywords or passages in the text.

• Assess the uses and limits of this approach.

16 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

I will discuss these three moves in detail in the rest of this chapter. Be-

fore I do so, though, I need to say that simply because this is the fi rst chapter

doesn’t mean that coming to terms with other texts is always the fi rst thing

you need to do as an academic writer. There are few things more tedious to

read than an essay in which a writer spends so much time carefully sum-

marizing and restating the work of others that, in the end, you’re left unsure

about what he or she actually wanted to bring to the conversation. Good

writers thus often draw quickly on terms and ideas from other thinkers. In

writing an academic essay, though, there is usually a set of texts and perspec-

tives that you need to consider at some length so that you can defi ne your

own views in relation to them. Such work is not always done at the start of

an essay or in some other, closely demarcated section of it, like a “literature

review”; instead, you are likely to fi nd that you need to slow down and think

through the views and phrasings of others at various points in a piece you are

writing. And although I will keep my examples here brief, you can’t always

expect to come to terms with a text or a writer in the space of a paragraph or

two. Some views and texts you encounter will almost surely seem to call for a

much more sustained analysis and response. But even if executing them may

sometimes become more complex, I think that the three central moves that

you need to make in coming to terms with a text—defi ning projects, noting

keywords, assessing uses and limits—stay the same.

Defi ning the Project of a Writer

“Who’s against shorthand? No one I know. Who wants to be shortchanged?

No one I know.” So said the New Jersey poet and doctor William Carlos Wil-

liams to another doctor and writer, the psychiatrist Robert Coles. Williams’s

remark appears in an essay by Coles, “Stories and Theories,” in which he

warns against the damage that can be done when complex views and expe-

riences are reduced to easy labels. And yet, to respond to another text you

have to summarize it, put its key

phrasings and ideas in some kind of

shorthand. So how do you do that

without shortchanging it, too?

The usual advice is to restate

the “main idea” or “thesis” of a text.

Intertexts
Robert Coles, “Stories and Theo-
ries,” in The Call of Stories (Boston:
Houghton Miffl in, 1989).

Coming to Terms 17

Such advice imagines a piece of writing as something fi xed or static, as an

argument that a writer has “constructed” or a position that she has “de-

fended”—and which can thus be condensed and reifi ed into something like

a “thesis statement.” But there are many writers who don’t so much argue

for a single claim or position as think through a complex set of texts and

problems. Their books and essays offer not sharply defi ned positions but

ways of talking about a subject. The questions to ask of such work draw on

metaphors of movement and growth: What issues drive this essay? What

ideas does it explore? What lines of inquiry does it develop? To try to reduce

this kind of open-ended text to a single main idea or claim would almost

certainly be to shortchange it.

Instead the question to ask is: What is the writer trying to do in this text?

What is his or her project? A project is usually something far more complex

than a main idea, since it refers not to a single concept but to a plan of work,

to a set of ideas and questions that a writer “throws forward” (Latin, pro +

jacare). The idea of a project thus raises questions of intent. A project is some-

thing that a writer is working on—and that a text can only imperfectly realize.

(Of course, any text you write will also hint at possibilities of meaning you

had not considered, imply or suggest things you had not planned. A text al-

ways says both less and more than its writer intends.) To defi ne the project of

a writer is thus to push beyond his text, to hazard a view about not only what

someone has said but also what he was trying to accomplish by saying it.

An example may help here. In her book In a Different Voice, Carol Gil-

ligan shows how mainstream theories of psychology stumble in helping us

understand why women respond to moral confl icts in ways that often differ

from men. Gilligan doesn’t suggest that previous generations of psycholo-

gists were wrong but rather that their views of the self were shaped and lim-

ited by their focus on the development of men. And so here, for instance, is

how she approaches a seminal essay by Sigmund Freud:

In 1914, with his essay “On Narcissism,” Freud swallows his distaste at
the thought of “abandoning observation for barren theoretical contro-
versy” and extends his map of the psychological domain. Tracing the
development of the capacity to love, which he equates with maturity
and psychic health, he locates its origins in the contrast between love for
the mother and love for the self. But in thus dividing the world between

18 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

narcissism and “object” relation-
ships, he fi nds that while men’s
development becomes clearer,
women’s becomes increasingly
opaque. The problem arises be-
cause the contrast between moth-
er and self yields two different
images of relationships. Relying
on the imagery of men’s lives in
charting the course of human
growth, Freud is unable to trace
in women the development of
relationships, morality, or a clear

sense of self. This diffi culty of fi tting the logic of his theory to women’s
experience leads him in the end to set women apart, marking their rela-
tionships, like their sexual life, as “a ‘dark continent’ for psychology.”

The fi rst thing I’d note about this passage is its generosity. Gilligan is

describing a view that she feels is deeply fl awed, that indeed she is writing

her book in an effort to correct, but her goal here seems to be to offer an

account of Freud’s thinking that he might have himself agreed with. Even

the problem with his theory that she points out is one that Freud himself

recognized, as Gilligan makes clear by quoting his comment about women

remaining a “dark continent” for psychology. This isn’t to say that her view

of Freud is disinterested. Gilligan is trying to clear space in this passage for

her own study of women’s moral growth through showing how his theories

are grounded in the experiences of men alone. In giving Freud his due, she

lends a sense of weight to her own response to his work.

Gilligan does not so much summarize “On Narcissism” as describe

Freud’s aims and strategies in writing it. The subject or actor of nearly ev-

ery one of her sentences is Freud—whom Gilligan pictures as “swallowing

his distaste” about theory, “extending his map” of psychology, “tracing the

development” of love, “locating its origins,” and so on. In doing so, she de-

scribes “On Narcissism” less as a structure supporting a single main idea

than as a series of moves that Freud makes as a writer. One strength of this

approach is stylistic: We tend to fi nd it easier to follow prose that offers

a narrative than prose that elaborates a set of abstract propositions—and

Intertexts
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice:
Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1982), 24.

Freud’s “On Narcissism” (1914)
is reprinted in The Standard Edi-
tion of the Complete Psychologi-
cal Works, vol. 14, ed. and trans.
James Strachey (London: Hogarth,
1961).

Coming to Terms 19

Gilligan here offers us a brief story of ideas with Freud at its center. More

important, to describe his plan of work, Gilligan needs to say something

about Freud’s aims, methods, and materials. This allows her, in her brief ac-

count of his essay, both to honor his project and to begin to point to some

of its problems—through representing what he was trying to do (trace the

origins of love), how he did it (examining the child’s relationship with his

mother), and where his data or insights came from (the early experiences

of male children).

You can ask much the same questions in defi ning the projects of other

writers:

• Aims: What is a writer trying to achieve? What position does he

or she want to argue? What issues or problems does he or she

explore?

• Methods: How does a writer relate examples to ideas? How does

he or she connect one claim to the next, build a sense of continu-

ity and fl ow?

• Materials: Where does the writer go for examples and evidence?

What texts are cited and discussed? What experiences or events

are described?

And, to follow Gilligan’s lead once again, you need to ask and answer

these questions in a generous mode. To make effective use of the work of

other writers, you have to show the force of their thinking, to suggest in

your rewriting of their work why they said what they said in the particular

ways they said it. And the best way to do that is to pay close attention to how

their texts are worded.

Noting Keywords and Passages

One mark of a strong academic writer is the ability to move from the global

to the local, from projects to phrasings, from talking about a text as a whole

to noticing moments of particular interest in it. To come to terms with

a complex text you need to be able to shift levels in this way, to ground

how you defi ne the project of a writer by citing key passages from his or

her text. Such quotations may often be short and pointed. If you return to

Gilligan’s paragraph on Freud, for instance, you’ll note that she quotes the

20 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

language of his essay at only three points, and each time quite briefl y: once

to show that Freud was concerned that in “On Narcissism” he was entering

the realm of “theoretical controversy,” another time to note the key concept

of “object” relations, and a fi nal time to show that he was aware that his

views had turned the experiences of women into a “dark continent.” (In

each case, the words quoted are Freud’s.) While these touches are light, they

are also crucial: Delete them, and one might ask, “But is that really what

Freud said?” Keep them, and even if you disagree with her account of Freud,

you still need to admit that Gilligan has noticed something about his text

and project.

There is a subtle but important distinction to make here: You don’t

quote from a text to explain what it means in some neutral or objective way.

You quote from a text to show what your perspective on it makes visible. If we

all read a text in the same way, there’d be little need for us to argue over the

meaning of its specifi c lines or phrasings. But academic writing is based on

the idea that we read texts differently. Intellectuals often discuss books and

articles that their readers are familiar with, and sometimes may even know

quite well. But the interest of an academic essay usually has less to with its

subject than with the approach of its writer. You don’t need to reexplain a

text to somebody who has already read it. But you can offer a different way

of reading that text, to point out how your perspective allows you to notice

something new about it.

In deciding when to quote, then, the question to ask is not What is the

writer of this text trying to say? but What aspects of this text stand out for me

as a reader? Quote to illustrate your view of a text, to single out terms or

passages that strike you in some way as interesting, troubling, ambiguous,

or suggestive. Weak academic essays are often marked by an overreliance on

quotation, as the words of the authors quoted begin to drown out those of

the person writing about them. You don’t want the writers you quote to do

your work for you. You want the focus of your readers instead to be on your

ideas, to draw their attention not to the texts you’re quoting but to the work

you’re doing with those texts. And so, when what you need to do is to restate

what a certain writer is trying to do, to represent her or his project, try to

paraphrase the work as quickly and accurately as you can. Save quotation

for moments that advance your project, your view of the text.

Coming to Terms 21

Or let me put it this way: Summarize when what you have to say about a

text is routine and quote when it is more contentious. Here, for instance, is I. F.

Stone, in The Trial of Socrates, pointing to what he sees as a key difference be-

tween the worldviews of the ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle and Plato:

Plato was a theorist, Aristotle a scientifi c observer. Aristotle prized
practical over theoretical knowledge in dealing with human affairs. Ar-
istotle had a strong bias in favor of experience and common sense. In
contrast, Plato in a famous passage of The Republic proposed to limit
his study of “the dialectic”—and thus the future rulers of his utopia—
to those who could “let go of the eyes and other senses and rise to the
contemplation of to on”—“pure being” or “being itself.” This would no
doubt be a contemplative joy to the mystic, but it hardly offers guid-
ance to the statesman, forced to deal with tangled affairs and obdurate
human nature.

Aristotle takes issue with Plato at the very beginning of his own
masterwork on philosophy, the Metaphysics. It starts off by saying, “All
men naturally desire knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem for
the senses.” Without them, and especially sight, Aristotle asks, how can
we know and act?

Plato and Aristotle both wrote many works, and their thought has been

the focus of an uncountable number of commentaries over the past 2,500

years. (Alfred North Whitehead once remarked that European philosophy in

large part “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”) So there is no way that

Stone (or anyone else) could possi-

bly “prove” that Plato was a theorist

and Aristotle an observer—at least

not in terms quite so simple. But I

don’t understand that to be his aim

in this passage. Rather, I think that

what Stone wants to show is that

there is a way of looking at Plato and

Aristotle that is both reasonably

fair to their work and useful to his

own project. (He goes on later in his

book to link Plato’s bent for theory

Intertexts
I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 13.

Stone quotes from the Loeb Clas-
sical Library editions of both Plato
and Aristotle.

Whitehead’s remark has itself
been quoted (and often misquoted)
in hundreds of other texts. It fi rst
appeared in his Process and Real-
ity, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press,
1978), 39.

22 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

to the antidemocratic politics of his mentor, Socrates.) Stone makes the

case for his approach through a pointed use of quotation, contrasting Pla-

to’s exhortation to “let go of the eyes and other senses” with Aristotle’s “es-

teem for the senses.” These sentences do not summarize the work of either

philosopher. No sentence or two ever could. Rather, they illustrate Stone’s

particular view of the differences between Plato and Aristotle. They are sa-

lient moments from his perspective as a reader. They show him rewriting

their work as part of his own project.

You’ll have noticed that I say of Stone’s approach that it seems “rea-

sonably fair” to Plato and Aristotle. Those may seem waffl e words, but I

don’t mean them as such. On the contrary, the question of what counts

as a fair reading lies at the center of much academic argument. Several of

Stone’s critics felt that he failed to represent the work of Plato and Socrates

very well, just as some of Gilligan’s readers thought that she misunderstood

Freud. Such disagreements are inevitable. The best you can do as a reader

is to try to show why you view a text in a certain way, both in terms of the

values you bring to the text and the moments you notice in it. Your readers

can then point to different values and different moments, and your ways of

reading the text can then be contrasted and argued for, if not resolved.

You can see quotations as fl ashpoints in a text, moments given a special

intensity, made to stand for key concepts or issues. A useful rule of thumb,

then, is to quote only those phrases or passages that you want to do further

work with or bring pressure upon—whose particular implications and res-

onances you want to analyze, elaborate, counter, revise, echo, or transform.

Such pressure does not have to be skeptical; you can quote from a text in

order to highlight the power of a particular way of phrasing an issue. For

instance, here is Cornel West, philosopher and cultural critic, near the start

of his book Race Matters:

The common denominator of these views of race is that each still sees
black people as a “problem people,” in the words of Dorothy I. Height,
president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fel-
low American citizens with problems. Her words echo the poignant
“unasked question” of W. E. B. Du Bois, who, in The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), wrote:

Coming to Terms 23

They approach me in a half-
hesitant way, eye me curiously
or compassionately, and then
instead of saying directly, How
does it feel to be a problem?
they say, I know an excellent
colored man in my town . . .
Do not these Southern out-
rages make your blood boil?
At these I smile, or am inter-
ested, or reduce the boiling to
a simmer, as the occasion may
require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I
answer seldom a word.

Nearly a century later, we confi ne discussions about race in America to
the “problems” black people pose for whites rather than considering
what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation.

This paralyzing framework encourages liberals to relieve their
guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at “the prob-
lems”; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism
of black people, liberals deny them freedom to err. Similarly, con-
servatives blame the “problems” on black people themselves—and
thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public
attention.

Making use of the words of Height, DuBois, and others, West constructs

a jazzlike progression that moves from “problem people” to “citizens with

problems” to “how does it feel to be a problem?” to “the ‘problems’ black

people pose” to “the problems” to “blame the ‘problems’ on black people

themselves.” I especially admire the fi nesse with which he distinguishes be-

tween the “problems” that liberals see as besetting blacks and the “problems”

that conservatives see blacks as causing. The net effect of these echoes-with-

a-difference is to give the word problem, as it is used in discussions of race,

a rich and disturbing complexity of meanings. West uses a series of quota-

tions to pull the term out of general usage, as it were, and to grant it instead

a particular history and meaning, to ask his readers to consider how race

poses a specifi c and unusual sort of “problem” for us.

Intertexts
Cornel West, Race Matters (Bos-
ton: Beacon, 1993), 2 3.

The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
is reprinted in The Oxford W .E. B.
DuBois Reader (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996). The pas-
sage quoted is found on p. 101.
West does not provide a reference
for the Height

quotation.

24 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

Projects

Translating a Text into Your Own Terms

The next time you need to come to terms with a certain

text in your writing, try approaching the task this way:

• Begin by restating the writer’s project in your own words.

Don’t consult the text at this point; work instead from

your memory and understanding of what its author was

trying to do. Keep this summary to a paragraph or two.

• Draw on your summary and list to write an account of

the text that makes use of both paraphrase and direct

quotation.

The point here is to create an account of the text that

does not simply rehearse what its author wrote but rather

expresses your understanding of her project.

Quotation thus has two distinct uses in coming to terms with the work of

another writer. On the one hand, it can serve as a brake on paraphrase. In quot-

ing key passages from a text, you show respect for the specifi city of its tone,

ideas, and phrasings. You make it clear that you have not carelessly substituted

its language with your own. On the other hand, quotation can intensify para-

phrase. It allows you to scrutinize particular moments in a text—to suggest

either the usefulness of a certain way of phrasing an issue (as West does with

“problem”) or its limitations (as Gilligan does with Freud’s “dark continent”).

I will return to this second use of quotation in the following chapters—since

bringing pressure on a writer’s phrasings is a crucial aspect of forwarding,

countering, or transforming her project. For now, though, I need to say a little

more about coming to terms as a form of reckoning or negotiation.

Assessing Uses and Limits

We live in a culture prone to naming winners and losers, rights and wrongs.

You’re in or out, hot or not, on the bus or off it. But academics seldom write

in an all-or-nothing mode, trying to convince readers to take one side or

the other of an argument. Instead their work assumes that any perspective

Coming to Terms 25

on an issue (and there are often more than two) will have moments of both

insight and blindness. A frame offers a view but also brackets something

out. A point of view highlights certain aspects and obscures others. And so,

in dealing with other writers, your aim should be less to prove them right

or wrong, correct or mistaken, than to assess both the uses and limits of

their work. That is to say, academic writing rarely involves a simple taking

of sides, an attack on or defense of set positions, but rather centers on a

weighing of options, a sorting through of possibilities.

In writing as an intellectual, then, you need to push beyond the sorts of

bipolar oppositions (pro or con, good or evil, guilty or innocent) that frame

most of the arguments found on editorial pages and TV talk shows. Intel-

lectual writers usually work not with simple antitheses (either x or not-x)

but with positive opposing terms—that is, with words and values that don’t

contradict each other yet still exist in some real and ongoing tension. For

instance, I have suggested in this chapter that you need to deal with the

work of others in ways that are both generous and assertive. These terms

are not direct opposites, but neither are they congruent. Rather, they name

different and competing values in writing that I believe you need to learn

to negotiate. Or, for another example, you might look back at the piece on

“Stories and Theories” by Robert Coles that I mentioned earlier. In that

essay, Coles distinguishes between two kinds of discourse: stories, which

we use in evoking the felt quality of events, and theories, which we use in

analyzing their meanings. A story is not merely a bad version of a theory or

vice versa. The two words describe distinct uses of language, each with its

own strengths and weaknesses. They are positive opposing terms.

Academic writers often bring a cluster of texts and perspectives into

this sort of positive opposition or tension. This is more complex and inter-

esting work than simply taking sides in a debate, since it involves thinking

through the potential uses of a number of positions rather than arguing for

or against a fi xed point of view. In coming to terms with a text, then, the key

questions to ask have to do not with correctness but use. What does this text

do or see well? What does it stumble over or occlude?

Here, for instance, is how John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, in their

book on The Social Life of Information, approach the work of one of their

colleagues:

26 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

Let us begin by taking a cue from MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. His
handbook for the information age, Being Digital, encouraged everyone
to think about the differences between atoms, a fundamental unit of
matter, and bits, and the fundamental unit of information. Here was a
provocative and useful thought experiment in contrasts. Moreover, it
can be useful to consider possible similarities between the two as well.

Consider, for example, the industrial revolution, the information
revolution’s role model. It was a period in which society learned how
to process, sort, rearrange, recombine, and transport atoms in unprec-
edented fashion. Yet people didn’t complain that they were drowning
in atoms. They didn’t worry about atom overload. Because, of course,
while the world may be composed of atoms, people don’t perceive it
that way. They perceive it as buses and books and tables and chairs,
buildings and coffee mugs, laptops and cell phones, and so forth. Sim-
ilarly, while information may come to us in quadrillions of bits, we
don’t consider it that way. The information refl ected in bits comes to
us, for example, as stories, documents, diagrams, pictures, or narra-
tives, as knowledge and meaning, and in communities, organizations,
and institutions.

The strength of this passage hinges on that moreover near the end of the

fi rst paragraph. Brown and Duguid use this term to signal a complex stance

toward Negroponte. They don’t deny the suggestiveness of the contrast he

draws between atoms and bits; in fact, they play with and elaborate upon it.

But they also suggest that there is something that this contrast fails to make

visible, or may even hide—something that has to do with the structures and

contexts in which atoms and bits are always embedded. They thus neither

simply endorse nor reject his perspective but point out its uses and limits.

They “take a cue” from Negroponte,

that is, not by simply restating his

view of how atoms and bits are dif-

ferent but by thinking more about

their relationship and deciding that

they can also be seen as similar.

They come to terms with his work

by showing both what he sees pow-

erfully and what he fails to notice.

Intertexts
John Seely Brown and Paul Du-
guid, The Social Life of Information
(Boston: Harvard Business School
Press, 2000), 15-16.

Brown and Duguid are discuss-
ing Nicholas Negroponte’s Being
Digital (New York: Basic Books,
1995).

Coming to Terms 27

Indeed, you might use moreover as a catchword for much of the work of

coming to terms with another text—in which you need not only to indicate

what a writer does well but also to suggest what she or he has left undone. In

arguing that academic writing needs to hold a number of competing views

in tension, though, I don’t mean to advocate tepid or bland prose. Rather,

I am urging you to approach writing with an active mix of skepticism and

generosity—both to look for gaps or diffi culties in perspectives you admire

and also to try to understand the strengths of those you don’t. Form the

habit of questioning your fi rst responses: So, here’s a text that seems to offer

a compelling way of looking at an issue—what does it also bracket out of

sight? Or, here’s a text that seems curiously wrongheaded or obtuse—what

might account for its seeming strangeness? what is its writer trying to ac-

complish? (If you really can’t answer such questions, you’re probably not

dealing with a text that you can put to good use, since simply proving some-

one else wrong rarely advances your own thinking.) To forward the phras-

ings or ideas of other writers, you need to know what they can’t do as well

as what they can. And to counter the work of another, you need to recognize

not just its limits but its strengths. I’ll have more to say about those forms of

rewriting in the next two chapters. My point here, though, is that to come

to terms with a text, you need not only to restate its project but also to take

its measure.

Projects

The Moves of Reviewing

Of the various moves I discuss in this book, coming to

terms with a text is perhaps the only one that can often serve

as the entire aim or purpose of certain kinds of writing—

namely, of reviews, prefaces, cover or liner notes, blurbs

and notices, annotated bibliographies, and the like. The

whole point of such forms of writing is to describe and

assess other texts.

In a consumer culture, such review texts are ubiquitous.

You can fi nd them in newspapers and magazines, on CD

covers, book jackets, store posters, websites, and the like.

28 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

Locate one and describe the moves its writer makes in

presenting the text she or he is discussing. In what ways

do these techniques align with or differ from the moves (for

coming to terms with another text as part of a larger essay)

that I have discussed here?

Quotation: Some Terms of Art

This is not a handbook but a text that tries to think through some ways of

working as a writer with the words, images, and ideas of others. I will thus

not review here the many and arcane rules for punctuating quotations and

citing sources—which, to my point of view, have more to do with typing

than writing and which, in any case, vary widely from one context to the

other. The best advice I can offer you is to ask your teacher or editor what

manual or style sheet you need to follow, buy a copy, and consult it care-

fully in preparing the fi nal version of your work. There are plenty of details

but few intellectual issues involved in compiling a list of references or works

cited; it’s the kind of thing you want to get right the fi rst time. The same goes

for citing sources and page numbers. Most academic disciplines now use

some version of parenthetical or in-text citation rather than footnotes, in

which you place key information about a text you’ve quoted (name, author,

page number, etc.) in parentheses following the quotation. If a reader then

wants to look up the text you’ve quoted, he or she can consult its fuller en-

try in your list of works cited. Exactly what information should go in these

parentheses, in what order, with what sorts of punctuation, as well as where

the parentheses themselves should be placed in your own sentence—the an-

swers to such questions can once again vary widely from one context or

discipline to the next. The only way to make sure you get it right is to learn

what style sheet to use. After that, pretty much the only thing you need to do

is to follow the format it lays out.

But how you actually go about incorporating other texts into your own

prose can also say a good deal about the stance or attitude you want to take

toward them, and in ways that cannot be reduced to a simple matter of rules.

There is, for instance, the question of how much you want to emphasize the

Coming to Terms 29

otherness of the texts you quote, to

what degree you want to make the

difference between their language

and yours visible on the page. The

advice given by most writing man-

uals, it seems to me, urges you to

downplay this sense of otherness, to

quote in ways that work toward the

illusion of a seamless text, incorpo-

rating the words of others as much as

you can within your own sentences.

On the other end of this spectrum

is a text like the Vulgate Bible, which

sets the words of Jesus in red type,

separating them from the prose of

the evangelists in a way that can be

seen, literally, from across the room.

My own sense, as I hope is suggested

by the look and feel of this book, is

that you want to develop a fl exible

repertoire of forms of quotation, in-

cluding:

• Block quotes: Setting or

“blocking” off the text of another writer from your own. Most

of the key examples in this book take this form. Block quotes

are often indented from the main text and set in a different font

and spacing. They are seldom framed with quotation marks.

Block quotes tend to make the work of others highly visible in

your writing. They are often used when you need to quote sev-

eral lines from a work, but also, and more important, as a form

of emphasis, as a way of saying that this is a text that you, as a

writer, plan to return to and work more with.

• In-text quotes: Incorporating the words of another writer as part

of your own text, while marking and framing your use of their

Intertexts
Several academic disciplines pub-
lish their own guides to document-
ing sources. Among those most
often used are:

Joseph Gibaldi, The MLA Hand-
book for Writers of Research Pa-
pers, 5th ed. (New York: Modern
Language Association, 1999).
(literature)

The APA Publication Manual, 4th
ed. (Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association, 1994).
(social sciences)

Kate Turabian, A Manual for
Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and
Dissertations, 6th ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Often simply called Turabian, this
manual offers a version of the
format defi ned by the voluminous
Chicago Manual of Style, 15th
ed. (University of Chicago Press,
2003). (humanities)

Most good handbooks provide
brief guides to the MLA, APA, and
Chicago styles.

30 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

work with quotation marks. In-text quotes are most often used

to note and emphasize particular terms and phrasings, to add

to and qualify paraphrase. They are usually brief, although you

may sometimes want to quote a full sentence or two without

giving it the weight of a block quote. The rules for punctuating

in-text quotes are byzantine and contested, although the basic

principle is simple enough: Punctuation creates distance. A quo-

tation introduced by a colon or a comma, or one that stands on

its own as a sentence, feels more separate from your words and

thinking than one that is dropped into the fl ow of your own

prose with little or no punctuation.

• Scare quotes: Putting quotation marks around a word to signal

that it is not one that you feel is apt. Scare quotes are the visual

marker of sarcasm. They often refer not to a specifi c moment in

a text but to a more general usage of a term. Cornel West makes

effective use of them in the passage I quoted previously, when he

says, “This paralyzing framework encourages liberals to relieve

their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at

‘the problems’ . . . Similarly, conservatives blame the ‘problems’

on black people themselves.” However, a little irony can go a long

way. Often the best test is reading aloud. If you fi nd yourself

dropping your voice sententiously each time you reach a quoted

term, consider limiting your use of scare quotes. Italics offer an

alternative way of putting emphasis on a word without giving it

a negative spin.

• Epigraphs: Setting a quotation at the head of a book, chapter,

essay, or section of an essay. The term epigraph comes from the

Greek, epi + graphos, “to write upon”; it thus refers literally to

an inscription—as on a statue, gravestone, or building. Some of

this meaning has carried over to its use in writing, as an epi-

graph is the one form of quotation that a writer is not expected

to comment on. Rather, it is usually the epigraph that comments

on the text that follows—that sets a tone or suggests a perspec-

tive, sometimes quite obliquely. When done well, an epigraph

can serve as a kind of poetic précis of a text, summing up its aim

Coming to Terms 31

or scope—even if its full meaning does not always become clear

until the piece has been read through and the epigraph consid-

ered a second time. Done less well, epigraphs can sometimes ap-

pear self-importantly literary, too erudite by half.

• Allusions: Leaving a brief quotation unmarked, in the expecta-

tion that readers will hear the echo of the other text in your own.

The term derives from the Latin, ad + ludere, “to play with,” and

suggests something more on the lines of a hint and a wink than

a direct statement. Academic writing often routinely proceeds

from direct quotation to a more mundane kind of allusion—as,

for instance, when the work of a writer is introduced by means of

a block quote, which is then followed by an analysis of key terms

and passages that are quoted in text, and fi nally when those

terms are used without quotation marks but still carrying a par-

ticular set of infl ections and meanings. In Race Matters, for ex-

ample, Cornel West follows the paragraph I’ve quoted with one

that starts, “To engage in a serious discussion of race in America,

we must begin not with the problems of black people but with

the fl aws of American society.” By this point in his text, West has

dropped the quotation marks from around problem, but his use

of the term still clearly echoes those of Height, DuBois, and the

“liberals” and “conservatives” that he has just cited. His prose al-

ludes to a set of meanings that he no longer needs to quote.

Block quotes, in-text quotes, scare quotes, epigraphs, allusions—these

are terms of art, words that the practitioners of a craft use to describe their

work. In learning such terms, you acquire not simply a vocabulary but a

sense of what distinctions matter in the practice of a craft. In this case, the

range of terms used to describe forms of quotation speaks to the key role

that dealing with the work of others plays in academic writing. The value

placed on representing other texts accurately is further shown by the set of

practices that academics have developed to show when a writer has needed

to alter a quotation, however slightly—as with the use of ellipses (. . .) to

mark a break in a quoted passage, of [brackets] to mark additions or changes

made to a text, and of the notation (emphasis added) to indicate when terms

32 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

in a passage have been italicized or otherwise highlighted. A strong use of the

work of others is always grounded in a scrupulous care in citing their texts.

Coming to terms in some ways offers the clearest example of what I mean

by rewriting. You come to terms with a text by translating its words and

ideas into your own language, making them part of your own prose—not

only re-presenting the work of another writer but also, at times, actually

retyping it as you quote key terms and passages from a text. But I suspect

that you will also fi nd that in trying seriously to come to terms with another

text, and especially in assessing its uses and limits, your focus as a writer

soon shifts away from simply restating what that text has to say and toward

the uses you can make of its concepts and phrases, or toward the gaps and

problems you encounter in trying to do so. I will turn to such forwarding

and countering moves in the next chapters.

Projects

Coming to Terms with Your Own Work-in-Progress

In chapter 5 I offer some ideas about how to apply each

of the moves I discuss in this book to your own work as a

writer. But you might also fi nd it useful to begin to think now

about how come to terms with a piece while you are in the

process of drafting it.

The next time you complete the fi rst full draft of a writing

project, see if you can write a paragraph or two in which

you describe your essay as it then stands. Don’t think of

yourself as writing a new introduction to your essay. Rather,

imagine your task as coming to terms with your own work,

representing your essay to someone who hasn’t read it. In

this brief piece, try to

• Defi ne your aim in writing your draft.

• Comment on the present strengths and limits of your

piece—those aspects or sections you’re pleased with and

those you want to work more on.

Coming to Terms 33

Such refl ective pieces can often be surprisingly hard to

write. But that is why they are useful, since the diffi culties

you meet in trying to come to terms with a draft may point

you toward work you need to do in revising it. You may fi nd,

for instance, in the early stages of a piece, that you’re not

really sure yet what your aim in writing is—or that your aim

is the fairly weak or uninteresting one of simply restating

what some other writer has said. If so, you will then also

know that you need to defi ne your own project in writing

more clearly. Or you might sense in the diffi culties you have

in mapping out an essay that there is something about your

line of thinking that is not yet quite clear even to you—and

thus that you need somehow to restructure your essay. Or

you may realize that the texts you’re working with, or the

passages you’re quoting from them, don’t really help you

make the points that you want—and thus that you need to

rethink the evidence for the position you want to take. In

coming to terms with an early draft of a project, that is, you

can begin to form a plan for revising it.

Forwarding

The painter’s products stand before us as though they were still

alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic si-

lence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as

if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what

they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just

the same thing forever.

—Plato, Phaedrus

The dead, thing-like text has potentials far outdistancing those of

the simply spoken word.

—Walter Ong, “Writing Is a Technology

That Restructures Thought”

Academic writing is often described as a kind of conversation. You read a text, you talk about it, you put down some thoughts in re-sponse, others respond to your comments, and so on. Or as the
poet, novelist, philosopher, and critic Kenneth Burke once put it:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others
have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion,
a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it
is about. In fact, the discussion has begun long before any of them got
there, so that no one present is qualifi ed to retrace for you all the steps
that had gone on before. You listen for a while, until you decide that
you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.
Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense;

Forwarding 35

Intertexts
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of
Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic
Action (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1973), 110 11.

David Bartholomae, “Inventing
the University,” in When A Writer
Can’t Write, ed. Mike Rose (New
York: Guilford, 1985), 134.

another aligns himself against
you, to either the embarrassment
or gratifi cation of your opponent,
depending on the quality of your
ally’s assistance. The hour grows
late, you must depart. And you
do depart, with the discussion
still vigorously in progress.

Others have drawn on this

metaphor to imagine the various

disciplines and professions as being, in effect, different sorts of conversa-

tions—each with its own rules of evidence and etiquette. In this view, to be-

come a lawyer, a historian, a biologist, or a social worker, you need to learn

to think and talk like a lawyer, a historian, a biologist, or a social worker.

Learning a subject means acquiring a discourse, not just mastering a body

of knowledge. As another teacher of academic writing, David Bartholomae,

has argued:

Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the uni-
versity for the occasion—invent the university, that is, or a branch of it,
like history or anthropology or economics or English. The student has
to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar
ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and ar-
guing that defi ne the discourse of our community.

This metaphor of writing as

conversation has several strengths.

It highlights the social aspects of

intellectual work, the ways in which

academic writing responds to the

texts and ideas of others. It suggests

that the goal of such writing is not

to have the fi nal word on a subject,

to bring the discussion to a close,

but to push it forward, to say some-

thing new, something that seems to

Intertexts
In this sense, the passage I’ve quot-
ed fails to suggest the larger aim
of Burke’s writing, which was to
theorize a “rhetoric of courtship,”
a discourse that strives for agree-
ment rather than confrontation,
identifi cation rather than division.
See Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of
Motives (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1969).

36 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

call for further talk and writing. And despite Burke’s somewhat militaristic

talk of allies and opponents, the metaphor also hints at the more civil tone

of much academic work. A dialogue is not a debate. You don’t win a con-

versation, you add to it, push it ahead, keep it going, “put your oar in,” and

maybe even sometimes redirect or divert the fl ow of talk. But you rarely win

over a person you are speaking with by fi rst refuting what she or he has just

said. The arts of conversation are subtler than those of debate; they join our

need to articulate the differences among us with our need to keep talking

with one another.

But if academic writing is a conversation, then it is one of a curious and

asymmetrical sort. For academics rarely write to the persons whose work

they are writing about. If you are assigned in a class, for instance, to respond

to a play by Shakespeare, you don’t expect its author to write you back. Your

writing is instead directed at other readers of the play. In quoting Shake-

speare, then, you are less entering into conversation with him (whoever he

may have been) than with fellow readers of his work (wherever they may

now be). You are recirculating his writing, highlighting parts of his text for

the consideration of others. And I’d argue that this is the case for most aca-

demic writing—that it does not reply to the texts it cites so much as forward

passages and ideas from them.

Another way to put this might

be to say that academic writing is

almost always intended to persuade

a third reader. One scholar will

criticize the work of another less in

the hope of having her rival recant

than in persuading other readers

to see the good sense of her (rather

than his) views. Even an indignant

author writing to protest a wrong-

headed review of his latest book ad-

dresses his letter “To the Editor.” If

you reply to an email post you have

received, you are engaging in a pri-

vate correspondence. If you forward

Intertexts
“When it has once been written
down, every discourse rolls about
everywhere, reaching indiscrimi-
nately those with understanding no
less than those who have no busi-
ness with it, and it doesn’t know
to whom it should speak and to
whom it should not. And when it
is faulted and attacked unfairly, it
always needs its father’s support;
alone, it can neither defend itself
nor come to its own support.”
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexan-
der Nehamas and Paul Woodruff
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 81
(275E).

Forwarding 37

that post (or part of it) to another set of readers, along with your comments

on it, you have begun a more public exchange. In the email program I use,

these two functions are illustrated by opposing arrows: reply ( ) sends

your comments back to the sender; forward ( ) directs them outward to

other readers. And these forwards can themselves be forwarded, to some-

times unexpected sites and publics—as anyone who has ever written an

email post that seemed to take on a life of its own, found its way to unin-

tended readers, can testify. The power of the Internet to make texts acces-

sible comes with a cost, as you not only gain readers for a text but also lose

control of its uses once you send it forward into the public sphere. (This was

precisely the worry about writing voiced centuries ago by the philosopher

Plato—that texts can become “fatherless,” detached from their authors and

interpreted recklessly.) Much of academic discourse thus tends to proceed

sideways, as writers take ideas and phrases from what they have read and

reuse them in approaching a different set of issues and texts.

As I write this book, for instance, I am sitting in a small room, before

a laptop computer, surrounded by books, papers, and magazines—all of

which I am, in some metaphorical sense, “in conversation with” (in much

the same way I am also in conversation with you, my imagined reader).

But what I am actually doing is working with a set of materials—looking

for books on my shelves and fl ipping through them, folding pages over or

marking them with Post-its, retyping passages, fi ling and retrieving print-

outs and photocopies, making notes in margins and on index cards, and,

of course, composing, cutting, pasting, formatting, revising, and printing

blocks of prose. I am, that is, for the most part, moving bits of text and paper

around. I don’t want to lose the metaphor of conversation entirely—writ-

ing is in a very real way a process of trying to say something to somebody.

But a text is also an artifact; it is not only something you say but something

you make. And so, even when your goal in writing is to enter into a kind

of conversation about a subject, to form your own response to what others

have had to say about it, the question remains of how to construct or as-

semble that response.

As I use the term, a writer forwards a text by taking words, images, or

ideas from it and putting them to use in new contexts. In forwarding a

text, you test the strength of its insights and the range and fl exibility of

38 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

its phrasings. You rewrite it through reusing some of its key concepts and

phrasings. In this chapter, I will focus on rewriting in the spirit of the texts

you are reading, of applying and extending their ideas and phrasings. And

then, in the next chapter, I will look at more skeptical forms of rewriting, of

bringing texts forward for criticism and counterstatement. But let me em-

phasize that this order is not in any way fi xed—there is no need, that is, to

always try to fi nd something nice to say about a text before criticizing it. You

might instead think of these two chapters as building on the moves I out-

lined in the previous chapter on coming to terms. In forwarding a text, you

extend its uses; in countering a text, you note its limits. These two moves

often double upon one another: In applying a text to new situations, that

is, you are likely to also end up revising some of its key words and concepts,

much as in countering the stance or phrasings of a text, you may well begin

to see how some of its aims might be better realized.

Projects

Conversing in Writing

Find a listserv or blog whose topics interest you. Spend

a few days following the exchanges on it. Note down those

moments at which the members of the list or board really

seem to be “conversing in writing” with each other, and also

note points where they seem to be doing something else

(forwarding, fl aming, digressing, whatever). How useful is

the metaphor of conversation in describing the exchanges

you’ve observed? What does the metaphor distort or fail to

describe?

In forwarding a text, you begin to shift the focus of your readers away

from what its author has to say and toward your own project. Writers often

describe themselves as drawing on or mining other texts for ideas and ex-

amples, but extracting such materials is only part of the job. You then need

to shape them to your own purposes in writing. There are at least four ways

of doing so:

Forwarding 39

• Illustrating: When you look to other texts for examples of a point

you want to make.

• Authorizing: When you invoke the expertise or status of another

writer to support your thinking.

• Borrowing: When you draw on terms or ideas from other writers

to use in thinking through your subject.

• Extending: When you put your own spin on the terms or con-

cepts that you take from other texts.

Illustrating provides you with material to think about: anecdotes, im-

ages, scenarios, data. Authorizing, borrowing, and extending are ways of

fi nding things in other texts to think with: keywords, concepts, approaches,

theories. I will discuss each of these four moves in more detail below. Re-

member, though, that when you forward an idea or passage from another

text you need not simply to cite but to use it. If you look to another text for

an example, you need to make it an example of what you have to say. If you

take a term from another writer, you need to show what you take it to mean

and how it contributes to what you are arguing.

Illustrating

Writing for school often starts with an assigned text: A teacher hands you a

book or essay to read and tells you to write an essay about it. But this isn’t

always—or perhaps even usually—how intellectual work begins. The impe-

tus for many projects lies instead not in a specifi c text but in a question or

idea or issue that a writer wants to explore. (There are exceptions, of course:

book reviews, studies of particular authors, etc.) Such work often begins

with something closer to a hunch than a thesis. You might, for instance, no-

tice how cell phones or email can sometimes seem to distance people from

one another as much as connect them, or how some advertisements seem to

promote not so much a product as an experience or sensibility. But to write

about such questions, you need to fi nd some texts that can help you focus

your hunch, formulate the issue more precisely. You need some texts, that

is, to use in thinking about your subject.

A few years ago, I was involved in editing a book of essays on the uses

of popular culture in everyday life. In doing so, I was struck by how many

40 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

critics began their essays by re-

counting a particular scene or im-

age from a movie, TV show, or

advertisement. Here, for instance,

is how Todd Gitlin starts his piece,

“We Build Excitement”:

An electronic throb comes
across the screen. Through
a blue-black, haze-shroud-
ed night city wanders the
solitary fi gure of a young

blond man. He is handsome in a blank way, expressionless, almost
robotic. The city is deserted. In this science-fi ctional future, the man
has left the present, society, the clutter of other people behind. Is he
liberated? Troubled? The electronic pulse continues. Vapors hover in
the street, catching the light. The man stalks through evacuated streets,
seeking signs of life. Suddenly, he spins around as if startled by a sound.
Overhead looms a billboard depicting—what posthistoric icon of the
age? The new Dodge. The sight fi lls him with awe. The car slides off the
billboard and out into the world. It has a life of its own; indeed, more
life than his own. It pursues him, calls him, teases him; the car is the ac-
tive agent. The two of them are alone in this vacated kingdom; he might
be the last man in the world. Now he turns and goes after the Dodge,
which gives him the slip. He follows it down a narrow street, but it’s
gone. And then, with the abruptness of a jump cut, he fi nds himself in
the driver’s seat. His blankness fades; it is a satisfi ed go-getter who now
turns to us and grins. Instantly dystopia segues into utopia. Accepting
the challenge of hypernew technology, the driver has earned his place in
the proverbial fast lane. The car then accelerates at Star Wars—like warp
velocity and takes off into ethereal hyperspace. “Dodge,” says the closing
logo after a breathless thirty seconds, “An American Revolution.”

This is a remarkable passage. Beginning with the visual image of the

“electronic throb . . . across the screen,” Gitlin intrudes on our conscious-

ness much as the Dodge commercial does: suddenly and assertively. His

short sentences evoke a sense of speed and fragmentation in tandem with

a set of neologisms (haze-shrouded, posthistoric, hypernew) that hint at the

futuristic feel of the thirty-second spot he is describing. His prose thus

Intertexts
Todd Gitlin, “We Build Excite-
ment,” in Watching Television, ed.
Todd Gitlin (New York: Pantheon,
1986); reprinted in Joseph Harris,
Jay Rosen, and Gary Calpas, eds.,
Media Journal: Reading and Writ-
ing about Popular Culture, 2nd ed.
(Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1999),
378 80.

Forwarding 41

responds to one of the particular challenges of writing about nonprint me-

dia—which is the need to re-present the texts you discuss, to translate them

into language that begins to evoke the experience of viewing or listening

to them. You can’t reproduce a television ad or a movie scene on the page

in the way you can recopy the words of a print text. Quoting the lyrics of a

song doesn’t always get at how it feels to hear it performed, and describing

the subject of a photograph or painting can only begin to suggest its total

impact as an image. Even the ability to scan or embed audio and visual fi les

into electronic documents fails to solve this problem completely—although

it does make writing about such texts more rigorous and interesting—since

in order to comment on an aspect of an image or performance you still

need somehow to put it in words.

In some ways, the diffi culty of quoting nonprint media highlights the

central problem of dealing with the texts of others: You need somehow to

make their work yours. Faced with the impossibility of rendering the whole

of an image or performance in words, you can only instead point to what

you see as its key moments or features. That is to say, in describing a movie

or song or ad, you need to interpret as you describe, to re-present the text in

a way that shows how it illustrates the point you want to argue. A few more

paragraphs into his essay, for instance, Gitlin’s motives in describing the

advertisement for Dodge start to become clear:

Altogether this style of urgent and displaced velocity represented the
most striking innovation in the automotive sales pitch of the mid-
eighties. All the fancy-free varieties of the high-tech format bore the
implication the car today is the carrier of adrenal energies, a sort of
syringe on wheels. “We Build Excitement,” in the words of Pontiac’s
slogan. The form of the commercial built a particular brand of excite-
ment. In the case of the futuristic Dodge, the relentless fl ickering pace,
the high-gloss platinum look, the glacially blue coloration, the dark ice
haze, the metallic music innocent of wood and strings—all suggested
something otherworldly and ungrounded. . . . The aggregate message
was not about cars alone, but about the current incarnations of Amer-
ica’s perennial dreams: freedom, power, technology.

Gitlin suggests that car ads do not sell simply cars but also an ideology

that prizes independence to the point of isolation, that links technology to

42 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

a kind of cowboy masculinity. The aim of the Dodge ad is to make the view-

er feel that Pontiac’s cars are somehow more virile, edgy, and stylish than

those of its competitors; Gitlin’s aim is to connect this pitch to an American

ethic that links violence to progress. And so many of his phrasings look two

ways, toward both the advertisement and his reading of it. He describes the

protagonist as both “handsome” and “robotic,” “troubled” and “liberated,”

“awed” and yet, by the end of the spot, satisfi ed, grinning, “in the driver’s

seat.” The streets are “evacuated” and yet, in an ethereal and blue-black way,

alluring, vaporous, pulsing. And the car is the “active agent,” teasing, pursu-

ing, hypernew, transforming. In Gitlin’s description, that is, the Dodge ad

comes to refl ect the “urgent and displaced velocity” of our culture.

What Gitlin has done is to give himself and his readers an example to

use in thinking through some ideas about our common culture. The Dodge

ad, that is, now serves a point that he is making. The aim of his writing is

less to understand the commercial on its own terms than to use it as a way

of getting at a larger issue in our culture. The text is not the object of his

analysis so much as a tool for his thinking.

None of this is to suggest that you should be anything less than scru-

pulous in dealing with texts that you bring forward as illustrations in your

writing. In formal academic writing, you need to cite nonprint media

along with print texts—usually noting the site and date of a performance

or broadcast, or when and how you accessed a website. Never work from

memory alone. Always have copies of any texts you discuss at hand: not

only books and magazines but videotapes, audiotapes, CDs, DVDs, MP3s,

scripts, lyric sheets, printouts, Xeroxes, postcards, photographs, and so on.

Take notes on interviews and events.

If you can, try to reproduce some

part of the texts you discuss in your

writing. (It is easy enough to scan

images into a text or even simply to

paste in photos or Xeroxes, and it is

quickly becoming more practicable

to insert audio and visual fi les into

electronic documents.) Save all the

texts you write about, especially any

Intertexts
Most research handbooks now
include guides to citing nonprint
media. Janice R. Walker and Todd
Taylor’s Columbia Guide to Online
Style (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1998) is especially help-
ful in offering not only rules but
working principles for document-
ing texts in various media.

Forwarding 43

that readers might have diffi culties accessing on their own (web links get

pulled down or changed, TV programs go off air, song lyrics can be unin-

telligible). The more confi dence your readers have in your descriptions of

such texts, the more they are also likely to credit your uses and interpreta-

tions of them.

Gitlin models a use of forwarding as a kind of opening move, a way

into a subject. While this sort of move is not always made at the start of an

essay or book, it does tend to mark hinge points in a text, moments where

a writer is moving from one line of thought to another. Sometimes a writer

may use a series of forwarded passages to stand for the key moves of a piece,

to offer a kind of outline of it through images and examples. For instance,

in the opening chapter of his book On Literacy, Robert Pattison defi nes lit-

eracy as involving not simply a mechanical mastery of the skills of reading

and writing but also “a consciousness of the uses of languages.” The liter-

ate person, Pattison suggests, realizes that words never simply describe the

world but rather always offer a particular view of it, and thus that we can

use language to shape beliefs and events—for both good and ill. He then

argues that this awareness of the power of words to infl uence action is

so fundamental that we may wonder if it is possible to be human with-
out it. Three instances of this basic sort of illiteracy come to mind: the
Wild Boy of Aveyron, Gracie Allen, and Homer’s Agamemnon.

Pattison then structures the rest of his chapter around these three ex-

amples of illiteracy. The Wild Boy, as portrayed in Francois Truffaut’s fi lm,

is someone who has grown up without ever learning to use language at all;

the comedienne Gracie Allen, in her radio skits with Fred Burns, is a person

who understands only the literal meaning of words, who never gets the joke

or the pun; and Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek campaign against

Troy in the Iliad, is a blustering bureaucrat who follows all the rules without

question or criticism. While his argument is too involved to restate in detail,

I think you can see how Pattison

uses these examples to suggest the

progress of his thought—moving

from examples of individuals with

no language to mistaken language

Intertexts
Robert Pattison, On Literacy (New
York: Oxford University Press,
1982), 5 18.

44 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

to a competent but limited language. The Wild Boy, Gracie, and Agamem-

non serve as markers of his ideas, steps in his argument, ways of thinking

about his subject.

Authorizing

But texts are sources of terms and ideas as well as images and examples. A

defi ning move of critical writing is the turn to another text for a key word

or concept. Sometimes this occurs as a quick appeal to another writer as

a voice of authority. For instance, in “Sex, Lies, and Advertising,” Gloria

Steinem invokes the views of an industry expert to support her claim that

advertisers often exert an undue infl uence on the editorial content of the

articles in women’s magazines:

Do you think, as I once did, that advertisers make decisions based on
solid research? Well, think again. “Broadly speaking,” says Joseph Smith
of Octoby-Smith, Inc., a consumer research fi rm, “there is no persua-
sive evidence that the editorial context of an ad matters.

There is real wit to this brief citation, as Steinem in effect calls on her

opponents in the advertising world to make her point for her. (Her essay was

written to explain and defend the politically brave but economically risky

decision of Ms. magazine to no longer accept advertising.) But Steinem’s

appeal to authority here is essentially the same as that made in the “review

of the literature” sections of many academic essays and books, where we

are diligently told “what research shows” or “what critics have observed”

or the like. This sort of move is often necessary to make, if only to prove

that you’ve done your homework, but it seems to me, for the most part, to

be a straightforward and routine form of intellectual housekeeping. The

best advice I can offer, then, is to follow Steinem’s lead in making such ap-

peals as succinct and pointed as you

can. (Often they can be relegated to

footnotes.)

Borrowing

You can call on other texts not sim-

ply to support but to advance your

Intertexts
Gloria Steinem, “Sex, Lies, and
Advertising,” Ms., July August
1990, 18–28; reprinted in Harris,
Rosen, and Calpas, Media Journal,
436 55.

Forwarding 45

work as writer through borrowing a term or idea from another writer to

use in thinking through your subject. For instance, in Amusing Ourselves to

Death, Neil Postman argues that we have shifted from a print- to a televi-

sion-based culture, and in doing so have also begun to privilege entertain-

ment and diversion over analysis. To explain what he feels is the dominant

role that TV plays in our lives, Postman both contrasts it to another tech-

nology and draws on the work of a quite different writer and thinker:

In the past few years, we have been learning that the computer is the
technology of the future. We are told that our children will fail in
school and be left behind in life if they are not “computer literate.” We
are told that we cannot run our businesses, or compile our shopping
lists, or keep our checkbooks tidy unless we own a computer. Perhaps
some of this is true. But the most important fact about computers and
what they mean to our lives is that we learn about all this from televi-
sion. Television has achieved the status of a “meta-medium”—an in-
strument that directs not only our knowledge of the world but our
knowledge of ways of knowing as well.

At the same time, television has achieved the status of “myth,” as
Roland Barthes uses the word. He means by myth a way of understand-
ing the world that is not problematic, that we are not fully conscious
of, that seems, in a word, natural. A myth is a way of thinking so deeply
embedded in our consciousness that it is invisible. That is now the way
of television. We are no longer fascinated or perplexed by its machin-
ery. We do not tell stories of its wonders. We do not confi ne our televi-
sion sets to special rooms.

Of course, anything written about computers is likely to seem comi-

cally out of date in little more than a year or two, and certainly, writing in

1985, Postman was not in a position

to guess at the impact that comput-

ers, email, and the web would soon

exert on our culture. But his point

that computers continue to intrigue

and trouble us while the technology

of television seems natural and in-

visible, a simple and given presence,

is still worth considering. Postman

Intertexts
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves
to Death (New York: Viking, 1985),
78–79.

Postman is drawing on the pref-
ace to a collection of essays by
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans.
Annette Lavers (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1972).

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