The Art of Forwarding

Joseph Harris breaks up his idea of “forwarding” into four different criteria: illustrating, authorizing, borrowing, and extending. Each of which is a particular method for an author to use to forward or pass on a previous author’s ideas to another group of people. Basically, I believe that in this chapter of Harris’ book, he is saying that in virtually every reputable text, be it a book, an essay, a movie, or what have you, it is imperative to have the reinforcement of a prior source in order to strengthen the work. However, just citing the source is not all that it takes to make an excellent statement. Harris makes this clear when he says, “Quoting the lyrics of a song doesn’t always get at how it feels to hear it performed, and describing the subject of a photograph or painting can only begin to suggest its total impact as an image” (41). This is a very relevant point in that it shows that once you cite an example from another source, you need to be able to add your own description to elaborate on the issue. Writing would be way too easy if you could simply use other people’s words alone.

An example of forwarding that I found came from one of the blogs that I have been following, Xtreme Music. The title of the blog post was, “Have Your Ears Adjusted to MP3’s?” The author of the blog post alludes to a study from a professor at Stanford University who researched how teenagers of today have become accustomed to the sound of mp3’s. Mp3’s are of lower sound quality than typical files that are on a cd. The study concluded that over the past few years, it seems that teens have more and more preferred the sound of mp3’s over the files on cd. I would say that the category of forwarding that this blog post falls under would most likely be illustrating. Harris defines illustrating as: “When you look to other texts for examples of a point you want to make” (39). The author of this post is using an example of a study to illustrate a point. The only real problem with his act of forwarding is that he does not really provide his own explanation to the story. This is what Harris warned about in this chapter. It is important to not fall into the trap of only using information from another source.