Trying to Take an Approach

            I found Harris’s definition of “Taking an Approach” to be a bit muddled and hard to follow.  I felt like in this chapter he was a bit scatterbrained about what taking an approach really meant.  I did draw from the chapter that he kind of saw it as not rewriting passages or ideas from a text but another writer’s mode or style of working.  I think he is suggesting that to be a proficient writer you can’t just rely on redoing what other writers have done, but you can use other writer’s style of writing. I think a good example of this can be found in artist movements like Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Modernism…etc.  Pablo Picasso is well known for his abstract cubism paintings that sparked a new way to paint.  The other painters of that era didn’t just recreate one of Picasso’s paintings; instead they reinvented it and made it their own. This is also a good place I think Harris’s idea of “Reflexivity” fits in.  Like for many painters and writers, there is a sense of ‘self’ in whatever they are creating.  Although big websites like the New York Times and Business Insider can’t really reflect in their news articles, I do think they are reflective in what quotes they choose to print in their articles.  In that way the writer is making the news story his or her own.  From the style of the NY Times you can tell the writers are sticking to the style of the other writers of the Times, but they are also adding their own spin on topics.  I think this is a semi accurate example of how the NY Times is “Taking an Approach.”