Taking an Approach

After I first read, “taking an approach,” I saw that I had some similarities to “forwarding” a text. If you were to forward a text, you essentially take an authors ideas and examples and use them to enhance your writing. “Taking an approach” is similar to “forwarding” in that you use an author’s idea to help prove the point you are making in a text. However, “taking an approach” specifically means to take an author’s writing style or “mode” and use that to build your own ideas. (at least that is what I understood from this confusing chapter).

According to Harris, there are three methods of using an author’s writing style to enhance your text. The first is “acknowledging influences” which essentially acknowledges the writers ideas that you use to enhance your writing. The second is turning an approach on itself, which is taking the questions that the author asks their audience, and asking those questions back to that author. The final method is reflexivity in which you the writer recognize the mode that he or she wrote in.

I initially found it hard to find examples of this in the Huffington Post of the New York Times, but I then realized is isn’t something that you can physically identify in their writing. The researchers, editors, writers and publishers are all applying their previous knowledge of different types of writing to the piece they are currently working on. A general example of this would a writer would try to draw on the emotions of the reader by using certain techniques that they learned over their years of reading.