Harris and Sullivan: The Purpose of Writing and the Validity of Blogging

Harris sees reading and writing as needing a broad understanding of the subject and you should be able to fall back on the authors ideas- use their quotes as proof. Writing needs specificity and proof but the problem with writing is that the original work that you read is hard to rewrite in an original way without generalizing. “The purpose of writing is to think critically, take risks, and to approach a revision as a re-vision”

Harris would most likely have both good and bad things to say about blogging. On one hand blogging is most definitely a “re-vision” of an original work and it has the most amount of risk because it is not thoroughly revised and checked for accuracy. Here in lies the problem. Harris would probably find issues with blogging because it requires no broad understanding of anything, and sentences asserted as facts, may not be truth at all. Therefore, when someone has maybe a source or two to base an entire opinion-based broadcast off of, the piece of writing tends to be incomplete. Harris sees writing as needing aims, methods, and materials. The aims are what the writing is trying to achieve. In relation to blogging, the aims of the writers can be cloudy and hard to determine. The methods are how the writer relates examples to ideas. As stated previously, when many bloggers base their writings off of only a few sources, examples tend to be lacking. The materials are where the writer goes for examples and evidence- again blogs can range from having no examples at all, to having many sources, like bloggers in the Huffington Post.

Overall, Harris would most likely equate Blogging, as a whole, to an elevated version of journal writing. It is emotionally charged, heavily opinionated, and usually lacking in proper evidence and broad understanding of the subject. Though there are validities in blogging like critical thinking and risk taking, Blogging will never be as legitimate of a form of writing as other more formal forms of writing. Blogging is like Wikipedia- it has vast amounts of information, much of it being relatively on point and accurate, but you can never fully trust the information presented because just about anyone can post in it. Whereas in a formal encyclopedia, or other historical writings, you can be assured that it is accurate because the writer cites hundreds of sources and texts, and is very well educated on the subject.