Forwarding

In Forwarding, Harris gets to the point of the chapter rather quickly. Within the first six pages, Harris establishes what he is attempting to show his audience, and then he uses the rest of the chapter to describe what the four types of forwarding are.

Harris uses the metaphor of conversation to help his audience understand what “forwarding” a text means. The goal of a conversation is not to win the argument or have the final say; rather it is to push it forward and bring up new ideas to further strengthen and add more credibility to a conversation. When forwarding a text, you take some aspect of that work and relate it to your writing. An essay should not try to tell their audience that there is only one opinion or idea that is correct. The idea of an essay should be to work with other texts to add validity and credibility to an argument. You are also carrying on a conversation by carrying ideas from other pieces of writing and applying it to yours. Your essay now becomes apart of a large string of thoughts and ideas, and maybe someday someone will engage in a conversation with your piece of writing. This is the idea of forwarding: actively engaging your writing with other pieces of texts, carrying on a conversation of sorts.

As aforementioned, Harris divides forwarding up into four different types: illustrating, authorizing, borrowing, and extending. By illustrating, writers apply specific examples from a separate text to their own. If a writer is authorizing, they are using the credibility of an author to strengthen their argument. If borrowing from a text, a writer is directly citing a writer’s text to further prove an argument. When extending a text, you take an idea presented by the author and interpret it in your own way.

In the blogs on the Huffington Post, forwarding is used everywhere. In every blog, there are examples of the four different types of forwarding. Blogging also allows for what I would call, “direct” forwarding. By this I mean they provide a direct link related to the issue that helps the reader get loser to the direct source of the news.