Customer Reviews

Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I have used this book to teach a freshman writing and reading course at a liberal arts school. Because of the difficulty of many of the texts, it was met by my students with little fanfare. While a few of the pieces are clearly too much for the average freshman (Foucault comes first to mind), most can be used effectively to get them to discuss issues. I have found that the students would rather talk in generals and universals than with the intricate arguments that some of the writers brilliantly present.
This is one of the those books that if you decide to use it in a class, then you better be prepared to not only sink with the ship but also be able to provide an inspiring tour of the ruins.

This tremendously rich and rewarding book is probably the best collection of essays, with the best apparatus (the most interesting questions, the best ideas for writing) of any teachable collection out there.

I teach at the University of California, Berkeley, and use this book, as do a number of my colleagues. Each one of these essays will unlock a world. Some of them, like Clifford Geertz or Paolo Freire or John Edgar Wideman or Adrienne Rich are centerpieces of my courses. History, anthropology, literature (the new addition of Alice Munro is a brilliant stroke), fieldwork, sociology... but to say that one can introduce any of these fields using this book doesn't do it justice.

These essays are complex and balanced, representing a wide variety of world views, whether political or aesthetic. Reading them requires some effort, but the essays will well repay that effort. They will transform any reader's ideas of what an essay can be.

I had to read this book for my upper division journalism class this fall and found it to be one of the best books that we used in the course. The editors have tried to collect well-written, intelligent documentaries that challenge traditional connections between words and photographs.

Included are Edward Said's inspiring piece about the Palestinian holocaust and exile, a piece by Roland Barthes about the meaning of photograph, "Let Us Speak Now of Famous Men," and many others. Although some pieces are better than others, Barthes' piece is more exciting and informative than Marianne Hirsch's writing on the way that children are used in photography. Over all, the collection is a rewarding and challenge book that could be used for any upper division class. (Maybe the reason that previous reviewers did not like the book is that it was not intended for first year college composition classes.)

I was required to purchase this book for an English class. The "short" stories in the book are extremely lengthy and wordy. The authors take multiple pages to state what would have been sufficiently written in a short paragraph. This is not my preferred style of reading/writing, however the various authors are accredited. The passages require thought and reflection from the readers, which is good, but I do not find it helpful as a textbook for an English class. We are required to read texts that are wordy, yet expected to write with concise thoughts and statements. I think that a book that modeled the style of writing we as students are expected to utilize would be a better fit. I would not recommend this book to a teacher/professor in search of materials for students unless they wanted their students to write with superfluous and redundant language.

This book contains great argumentative writing in it. We used this book when I was a freshman in college for my argumentative class at the Universoty of Florida. It has classic scenarios of critics and advocates of movements expressing themselves in essay form. This book contains arguments about real life events that occured recently and discusses them in a very intellectual level. One of the best things about this book is that you can compare the essays within with other essays in the book. Sometimes the essays are foils of one another and through this you can see their subjective viewpoint more clearly. Most of the time the essays do compliment one another and intensify the other's argument tenfold.

This is the "default" textbook for the sophomore English Composition course I am currently teaching. If I had been given a choice of textbook, I would definitely not have chosen this one. When I teach freshman English Comp, Business Writing and Technical Writing courses, I inform my students that they should write clearly, eschew difficult vocabulary and context in an ill-advised effort to "sound" clever, and avoid using ten words when two or three will convey the intended meaning just as well (or better). I'm disappointed to find that all of these concepts are flouted by several of the authors and selections presented in this anthology.

Perhaps this is because I enjoy reading the works of Shaw more than Shakespeare, or because I grew up during the Punk/New Wave Era instead of the Baby Boomer formative years, but when I read the glowing reviews of this book, I think, to paraphrase Shaw, that educators give it good reviews not because they like it, but because they think they ought to like it. They praise lengthy sentences and unclear prose because they believe they owe it to their positions as academics and intellectuals.

This is not to say that there is no place for these works, or indeed that all of them are poorly written. I would certainly recommend some of the essays, and Eady's poems, as a springboard for discussing racism in American society. In addition, one could use Paulo Freire's thoughts on teaching, in conjunction with Richard Rodriguez's anecdotes on being a motivated student in an unmotivated school, to examine the problems of educating individuals in a group setting. Having stated this, such topics are not always appropriate for an English Composition course; for sociology and educational psychology, yes, but for teaching principles of good writing, no.

However, the works of Foucault, McKeon and Appiah are more confusing than enlightening for the average college sophomore, and I have found that, rather than encouraging discussion, a great deal of time is wasted on trying to work out what the point of the writing is. If we want to encourage our students to read closely and respond to texts, there are better choices out there.

Ultimately, the purpose of English Composition courses is to teach writing, not to tell students, as the editors of this anthology do, that the book's selections are difficult to understand but they are to make the best of it. This is condescending at best and utterly discouraging at worst. In either case, it is not the best way to bring out students' writing skills.

I used this book in my Freshman comp. course with success. The essays are very difficult, so the pace of the course is very slow. We read sections of the works in class, did close reading as a class and had multiple levels of writing.
I won't lie - my workload doubled. I graded more, met with students more, revised the course as we moved through it more. This book is not for lazy professors. If you're a professor who wants to use this, then read the introduction first. Bartholomae is completely up front about how much time he spends on classwork.
The results were completely worth it and I firmly believe that the course, with all of its student moaning and groaning helped prepare my students for more rigorous work later. Read some of the senior students comments and stop treated freshmen like idiots. They will grow into this book if guided to.Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers

While this is an excellent book for teaching college Freshman how to write by developing critical thinking skills, I'm neither a Freshmen nor eighteen - my college requires me to take this general breadth course. I would also have given it a higher star reading if it was available as a Kindle download. ATTENTION EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHERS: Get into the 21st century! ALL textbooks should have a digital option.

I really don't understand the bad reviews this book is getting here. It's simply a large collection of creative academic essays by different authors, ranging in quality from good to fantastic. This book revealed to me that creativity, humor and personal narrative could enhance and deepen academic writing. These essays suggest radically different ways of looking at the world and leave you as a thoughtful reader to make your own intellectual choices. Coming out of high school, I had no idea that essays could be so good and accomplish so much.

I still think about the things I learned from this book all the time. Clifford Geertz's essay on Balinese Cockfighting fundamentally changed my understanding of the role of art and public ritual in society. Patricia Limerick's essay on the Modoc Wars explains in ten pages everything you really need to know about the destruction of the native american way of life and on top of that it's really entertaining.

I recommend this book to absolutely anyone who likes thinking. It's that good.

I have to read this book for my Freshman year of college, what a waste of money. I now see why everyone hates colleges because they charge thousands of dollars for each class to shovel this useless crap into our minds. Most of these "essays" are actually chapters taken out from books so its obvious your never going to fully understand the point(if there even is any) because you need to read the book, not a dumb chapter from the middle of it. Ways of Reading loves to clarify every other sentence how brilliant, sophisticated, and original these authors are. In reality the authors present very simple concepts that most highschoolers can grasp by their Junior year. But the difference is that because they think they are brilliant, sophisticated, and original the authors add loads of crap just to make it lengthey and boring. As said in previous reviews, all contents in this book can each take up a page if they get to the point. As for the set up of the book, it is also terrible. Introductions for each of these stories is two pages at the most, not near enough to understand these looney authors, after reading, you are given four "questions" that are at least two paragraphs long and it seems sometimes they forget to ask a question. In the back of the book are Seven "sequences" focused on developing the reader in some way. Because this book comes out with a new edition like every year(NINTH EDITION now!) you are never going to be able to complete these "sequences" entirley so the teacher basically just gives you random parts of each, so basically the whole book is pointless to read and turns out to be a complete wast of money. Too help students who have just realized what they are going to go through I will help you by briefley describing what some authors were trying to get at.

Michel Foucault-Panopticism: The Matrix Trilogy
Susan Bordo-Beauty (re)Discovers the Male Body: Old woman getting horny staring at gay men
Richard Miller-The Dark Night of the Soul: Random stories and quotes from different books to fill in so Richard Miller can make a book and be rich.