Joseph Harris once again seems to hit the nail on the head with his chapter titled “Forwarding.” What I mean by this is that everything Harris mentions in this chapter seems to coincide perfectly with our class discussions. It appears as though, as a class, we establish a sort of theory regarding writing in the Information Age, and then our “theory” becomes solidified through Harris’s work. “Forwarding,” according to Harris, refers to the process by which writers take “ideas and phrases from what they have read and reuse them in approaching a different set of issues and texts” (Harris 37). I understand forwarding as a way of using sources in multiple different manners to support your argument. The multiple different manners of using sources include illustrating, authorizing, borrowing, and extending. They are all used by the writer to advance his or her project. Illustrating helps writers introduce or explain their argument. Authorizing gives writers credibility because it provides a dependable and professional scholarly view of a particular topic. Borrowing simply means taking a particular term or phrase from another writer and using it to advance your own project. Extending, on the other hand, takes a term or phrase from another writer and then elaborates on the term, perhaps in a manner that does not reflect (but neither contradicts) the original meaning.
I went to The Daily Beast website to find an example of forwarding. Robert
Shrum wrote an article titled “Obama Must
Fight One More Campaign: To Keep Senate & Win House in 2014,” where he
argued that the only way the President can fulfill his agenda is through a third
term. Note: Shrum refers to the third term as the 2014 Congressional elections,
not the 2016 Presidential election, where a third term would be
unconstitutional. In this article Shrum authorizes his claim by using
irrefutable data. He also practices forwarding by borrowing the phrase commonly used
by republicans, “bleed it with the sequester” to explain the impact of the
spending cuts. These examples of forwarding add a level of reliability to the
article because they allow the reader to gain an additional perspective
regarding a topic while simultaneously reading Shrum’s opinion. By not
elaborating on the republican’s meaning behind the phrase, “bleed it with the
sequester,” Shurm’s article does take on a bit of bias, because he used the
term to advance his own agenda.
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