9/9/13

To say that Thomas Jefferson was an effective borrower of traces when writing the Declaration of Independence put things in a completely different perspective for me. I have always thought that all writing is a trace of another authors works, thoughts and words, and so on, but to use the Declaration of Independence as an example was interesting to me.

It is true that Jefferson couldn't have written the Declaration of Independence without sources and other points of reference to go off of. The information, sources and language he collected were then placed as traces throughout the document. Yet his original prose made up the parts of the document least acceptable to Congress.

I have to agree with Halliday when he says, "Creativity does not consist in producing new sentences. The newness of a sentence is a quite unimportant-- and unascertainable and 'creativity' in language lies in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the potentiality of language for the indefinite extension of its resources to new contexts of situation... Our most 'creative' acts may be precisely among those that are realized through highly repetitive forms of behavior." When we write essays for school, we are often graded on our ability to analyze and bring meaning to literature we read, concepts we learned in class, etc. We are rarely graded on what new sentences we can put together and rarely the invention of a new idea all together, rather, a new way of looking at something, a new angle. The creative borrower is the creative and the GOOD writer.