--> Forwarding

          Most of the idea of “forwarding” can be found earlier in Harris’s discussion of “coming to terms” with a text. In that chapter, he said you had to approach a text and by applying it find out what its uses and limits are. Forwarding is the idea behind the “uses” of a text (the limits are apparently found in the next chapter on countering). When you forward a text, you take some aspect of it, whether it be the author’s status, an idea, or an actual phrase, and tie it into your writing. He splits forwarding up into four areas. By “illustrating” a text you are using it for examples; you find a section of writing with the same motive as your own and incorporate it to present your discussion in a different way. When “authorizing” a text you cite the expertise of the author, and similarly when “borrowing” from another text you add exact words and ideas to support your position. “Extending” a text is the last facet of forwarding; to do this  you take an idea and put it in a different light, put your own spin on it.

Before reading Harris’s book, I would have called this idea of “forwarding,” research. Like when I’ve had to write a paper for school with so many sources, I would look up useful articles and then plug them in here and there in my argument.  I saw it as using others’ work to give yours credibility and academic weight. And I also just saw this as applying to true research papers. But I realize this isn’t the case; anything you write should draw on other texts. And the information you use is not just adding to the validity of your paper, but continuing the discussion already put in motion by those authors your take from and the ones before them. That’s the idea of forwarding. When writing like this your paper stops being independent; it becomes part of the stream of ideas. Other authors’ thoughts flow into yours and you combine with them, forward them, and then send them off to join with someone else’s.

In forwarding, I think most of the text remains the same. Early in the chapter, Harris talked about forwarding as sending your work out into the world. In this sense, you lose the control over what happens to it, but under his extended definition, most of the text will be conserved. According to Harris, when you take from other texts, you are supposed to place it in context (explain what it originally meant) and then apply it to your argument. Nothing is lost here, and I wouldn’t say anything is gained either. It could be said that the original text has been altered because it is being put in the context of a new argument which may be talking about something completely opposite. Because the text will now be associated with this new idea, it has been altered. 

Because of the nature of the Onion, I haven’t found much serious forwarding. There is a fair amount of “extending” though. Whenever it posts articles that parody the real news that day, the Onion is pointing out the news and then twisting the idea to suit its purpose.