critical response: Introduction to Rewriting After reading the Introduction to Rewriting, 2nd edition (pages 1-13), type up an outline.Choose 10-15 importa

critical response: Introduction to Rewriting After reading the Introduction to Rewriting, 2nd edition (pages 1-13), type up an outline.Choose 10-15 important concepts you learned in this section. Use quotation marks, and include a page number for each of these concepts. Also, use bullet points or numbering for each new concept. Underline or bold any key terms/phrases for emphasis within each bullet point. For each bullet point (concept), add 1-2 sentences, explaining the importance of this concept, or why it stood out to you. Use complete sentences.Aim for 400-800 words total. Put this word count in the 5th line of your heading.please make sure you read and follow the directions After reading the Introduction to Rewriting, 2nd edition (pages 1-13), type up an outline.
1. Choose 10-15 important concepts you learned in this section. Use quotation marks, and
include a page number for each of these concepts. Also, use bullet points or numbering
for each new concept. Underline or bold any key terms/phrases for emphasis within each
bullet point.
2. For each bullet point (concept), add 1-2 sentences, explaining the importance of this
concept, or why it stood out to you. Use complete sentences.
3. Aim for 400-800 words total. Put this word count in the 5th line of your heading.
Introduction
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No
part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews.
-U.S. copyright notice
A text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cul-
tures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody,
contestation.
-Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
y aim in this book is to help you make interesting use of the texts you
read in the essays you write. How do you respond to the work of oth-
ers in a way that is both generous and assertive? How do you make their
words and thoughts part of what
you want to say? In the academy
Intertexts
you will often be asked to situate
As Jonathan Culler writes: “Literary
your thoughts about a text or an is-
works are not to be considered
sue in relation to what others have autonomous entities, ‘organic
wholes,’ but as intertextual con-
written about it. Indeed, I’d argue
structs: sequences which have
that this interplay of ideas defines
meaning in relation to other texts
academic writing–that whatever
which they take up, cite, parody,
else they may do, intellectuals al-
refute, or generally transform.” The
Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
most always write in response to the
nell University Press, 1981), 38.
work of others. (Literary theorists
1
es-
call this aspect of writing intertextuality.) But to respond is to do more
than to recite or ventriloquize; we expect a respondent to add something
to what is being talked about. The question for an academic writer, then,
is how to come up with this something else, to add to what has already
been said.
noidaubon
My advice here is to imagine yourself as rewriting—as drawing from,
commenting on, adding to—the work of others. Almost all academic
and books contain within them the visible traces of other texts—in the
says
form of notes, quotations, citations, charts, figures, illustrations, and the
like. This book is about the writing that needs to go on around these traces,
about what you need to do to make the work of others an integral part of
your own thinking and writing. This kind of work often gets talked about
in ways—avoiding plagiarism, documenting sources, citing authorities, ac-
knowledging influences—that make it seem a dreary and legalistic concern.
But for me this misses the real excitement of intellectual writing—which is
the chance to engage with and rewrite the work of other thinkers. The job
of an intellectual is to push at and question what has been said before, to re-
think and reinterpret the texts he or she is dealing with. More than anything
else, then, I hope in this book to encourage you to take a stance toward the
work of others that, while generous and fair, is also playful, questioning,
and assertive.
This has led some readers to ask why I’ve chosen a term like rewriting to
describe this sort of active and critical stance. And, certainly, I hope it’s clear
that the kind of rewriting I value has nothing to do with simply copying or
reciting the work of others. Quite the contrary. My goal is to show you some
ways of using their texts for your purposes. The reason I call this rewriting is
to point to a generative paradox of academic work: Like all writers, intellec-
tuals need to say something new and say it well. But for intellectuals, unlike
many other writers, what we have to say is bound up inextricably with the
books we are reading, the movies we are watching, the music we are listen-
ing to, and the ideas of the people we are talking with. Our creativity thus
has its roots in the work of others-in response, reuse, and rewriting.
Rewriting is also a usefully specific and concrete word; it refers not to a
feeling or idea but to an action. In this book I approach rewriting as what
the
ethnographer Sylvia Scribner has called a social practice: the use of certain
2 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts
O more
nething
I, then,
already
g from,
emic es-
– in the
and the
se traces,
l part of
ed about
rities, ac-
concern.
-which is
5. The job
tools (laptop, tablet, pen and paper)
in a well-defined context (the acad-
Intertexts
emy) to achieve a certain end or
Sylvia Scribner, “The Practice of
Literacy,” in Mind and Social Prac-
make a particular product (a criti-
tice (New York: Cambridge Univer-
cal essay). There are practices in all sity Press, 1997), 190-205.
walks of life-ways of farming and
gardening, of working with leather
or wood, of interviewing clients and counseling patients, of teaching and
coaching, of designing and engineering, of setting up labs and conducting
experiments. A practice describes how the members of a particular craft or
trade get their work done. A problem with many books on writing, it seems
to me, is that they fail to imagine their subject in meaningful terms as such
a practice. Instead, they tend to alternate between offering advice that is
specific but trivial-about proofreading or copyediting, for instance—and
exhortations that are as earnest as they are vague. Or at least I have never
felt sure that I knew what I was actually being asked to do when called upon
to “think critically” or to “take risks” or to “approach revision as re-vision.”
But by looking here at academic writing as a social practice, as a set of strat-
egies that intellectuals put to use in working with texts, I hope to describe
some of its key moves with a useful specificity.
Much of my thinking about writing hinges on this idea of a move. My
subtitle alludes to one of the quirkiest and most intriguing books I have
ever read, the philosopher J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. In
this book, actually the notes from a series of lectures, Austin argues that in
thinking about language his fellow philosophers have long been overcon-
cerned with decoding the precise meaning or truth value of various state-
ments—a fixation that has blinded them from considering the routine yet
complex ways in which people use words to get things done: to marry, to
promise, to bet, to apologize, to persuade, to contract, and the like. Austin
calls such uses of language performatives and suggests that it is often more
useful to ask what a speaker is trying to do in saying something than what
ore, to re-
anything
oward the
estioning,
ewriting to
pe it’s clear
copying or
you some
rewriting is
rs, intellec-
uals, unlike
bly with the
e are listen-
ativity thus
he or she means by it.
riting.
fers not to a
While I don’t try to apply Austin’s thinking here in any exact way, I
do think of myself as working in his mode—as trying to show how to do
things with texts, to shift our talk about writing away from the fixed and
as what the
se of certain
Introduction 3
static language of thesis and struc-
Intertexts
ture and toward a more dynamic
J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with
Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA:
vocabulary of action, gesture, and
Harvard University Press, 1962).
response. You move in tandem with
What I find of particular interest or in response to others, as part of
to my work here is a moment, near a game or dance or performance or
the very end of his lectures, when
Austin offers a short list of what
conversation-sometimes toward
he calls “expositive” verbs—those
a goal and sometimes just to keep
that are used in “the expound-
the ball in play or the talk going,
ing of views, the conducting of sometimes to win and sometimes to
arguments, and the clarifying of
usages and references”-in effect,
contribute to the work of a group.
beginning to outline his own set of
I hope in this book to describe in-
“moves” for academic writing (see tellectual writing as such a fluid and
pp. 161-63).
social activity and to offer you some
strategies, some moves as a writer,
for participating in it.
To do so, I draw on my experiences over the last thirty years as a writer
and teacher of academic writing. And so, while this book is filled with ex-
amples of intellectuals at work with texts, they are examples that perhaps, in
the end, tell as much about my own tastes, training, and values as anything
else. That is to say, in this book I use my own ways of responding to and
working with texts, my own habits of reading and writing, as representa-
tive of what other academics and intellectuals do. The drawback of such
an approach, I suspect, is not that it is likely to be idiosyncratic but the re-
verse—that I may end up simply rehashing the common sense, the accepted
practices, of a particular group of writers. But that is also, in a way, my goal:
to show you some of the moves that academics routinely make with texts, to
articulate part of “what goes without saying” about such work.
move:
The Structure of This Book
Each of the chapters in this book centers on a particular rewriting
coming to terms, forwarding, countering, taking an approach, revising, and
remixing. But these six moves do not by any means compose a fixed se-
quence for writing a critical essay. On the contrary, I am sure that as you
work on different pieces, you will find yourself using these moves in varying
4 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts

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