Core Readings

Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to do Things With Texts is, in many ways, the backbone of the College, Career, and Community Writers Program. C3WP has adopted Harris’s understanding of academic writing as a conversation (complementary to Graff and Birkenstein), especially his focus on using “other people’s words.”

Harris has also contributed to a stance towards sources in argument writing (one supported by Gage and Lynch et al in the supplementary readings), one of generosity and inquiry towards sources. Like Gage and Lynch et al, Harris does not subscribe to the point/counterpoint oppositional view of argument, but to a view that there are shades of agreement and difference among sources. The introduction and Chapter 1 set this tone and could be usefully paired with Graff and Birkenstein early on in C3WP professional development.

Harris’s book makes a direct contribution to C3WP by naming the “moves” that writers make when they use sources. By doing so, Harris expands the purposes of citing other people’s texts. In chapters 2 and 3, Harris names and defines the moves writers make with texts under the categories “forwarding” and “countering.” Some of these moves (“illustrating,” “authorizing,” extending” and “countering”) are used in C3WP instructional resources and in the Using Sources Tool. Reading and discussing this text together provides an important entry point into C3WP resources.

When students dive into a set of nonfiction sources and understand the ways that they are in conversation with one another, there is a stage of learning that precedes (and accompanies) that actual building of an argument. The inquiry into the subject matter is most powerful when enjoyed with an open mind and with the possibility that each reading could play a part in creating or altering a writer’s claim. The rich classroom practice and theory described in chapters 1-2 of Thomas McCann’s Transforming Talk into Text: Argument Writing, Inquiry, and Discussion, Grades 6-12 describes an approach to teaching argument writing fits beautifully with C3WP.