What is "taking an approach?"

            Harris initially defines “taking an approach” as writing in the “mode of another author.” As to the definition of mode, it’s a style of thinking or how the author goes about writing and organizing and presenting their ideas. Taking an approach is different than just forwarding; you don’t just provide more examples to affirm a position, you reshape it. Harris then goes on to use the example of a cover song; I thought of hamlet and The Lion King. Both things take a new approach to old material. 

This is where I get confused. In this chapter, Harris didn’t really give a satisfactory definition of “taking an approach,” or at least not a clear one. To me there seemed to be three or four completely different methods that he was labeling the same thing. The example I wrote above about cover songs and such seems to contradict the sentences just before it. A cover song uses an author’s subject matter but takes its own approach. Just before that, Harris was defining “taking an approach” as using the author’s approach to further one’s own subject matter, or even the author’s subject matter. He kind of flip-flops. And then after loosely stating this, the rest of the chapter is a discussion on how to acknowledge your influences! Which seems to be a completely different idea, like a new method called “making acknowledgments.” In this discussion he illustrates how pointing out who and what experiences have influence you to your readers is a valuable thing; that way they know where you are coming from and how to read your work. He provides many examples of writers doing this at the beginning of their books, like in an introduction. “Metatext” is when writers write about what they are going to write about. I always thought this was kind of superfluous; why explain everything you are going to write about and why when you could just get on with it? If you write an affective essay/book/whatever you shouldn’t have to spell everything out beforehand.  

                Harris’s points about acknowledgements were fine, but I didn’t see how they had anything to do with “taking an approach” as he originally defined it.  I honed in on his personal example of when he applied this method. Harris said he had read a book where the author had used terms to provide the organization and flow for his discussion and had taken that approach and used it in his own book. This is what I see as taking an approach; using another author’s organizational and tonal style and writing in that way. 

                The Onion doesn’t do much in way of applying someone else’s approach but they certainly have their own. They write about the news by being satirical. They write humorous articles in which they take the truth and turn it completely upside down and then present it straight-faced with a serious, professional front. Like the article “Disturbed Beltway Sources Report Congress EerilyCooperative Today.” The story points out how we have come to expect Congress to be an uncooperative body by writing that if they are, the world must be coming to an end.