And the Text Moves On...

To Harris, forwarding is basically the idea of taking text from previous works and compiling it into your own. However, it is not in a sense a copyright violation because you can reword the text, and make it your own. I feel he really gives great insight into the way people learn in this chapter. He states, “Learning a subject means acquiring discourse, not just mastering a body of knowledge.” This idea makes perfect sense. A student really does not know much about a topic at all until they are able to speak the language associated with it. In this aspect, we are forwarding our own knowledge about a subject to others every time we speak of it. We are taking words learned from textbooks, and putting them to use in a new context. This is Harris’s underlying idea of forwarding.
I think a prime example of this technique is the Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan. Throughout his blog one can find comments written by readers, links to articles, and Sullivan’s own opinion on issues in the world today. He quotes comments in new posts, using them in a new context. Most of the quote remains intact, and he usually will give his opinion on what his readers are writing to him about. In my other blog, Seth Davis frequently uses information from other individuals, and then proceeds to give his opinion about what has been stated. He comments on scores from games, news reports about players, and also the character of each athlete, which can be considered forwarding when you think about character being the ideas of a person. Since reading this chapter I have noticed that almost every text I pick up makes use of forwarding. When I think about it, I believe I have used this technique in my writings throughout school, I just never thought consciously about what I was doing. With forwarding we can take our writings to new levels using the help of others.