Customer Reviews

Words on Paper: Essays on American Culture for College Writers

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is for my class and our class is learning a lot from the reading material. We often have to do discussions on what we read or what the professor has planned which is based off some reading in this book.

This book has everything I need to teach my basic writing course. It has relevant themes, interesting readings, writing suggestions, and excercises for editing. I have been using this text for a almost a year now, and all of my classes have enjoyed it very much, both in the classroom, and in my online courses. I would highly reccomend this book to anyone who likes to focus on reading and the writing process in a college composition classroom!

I teach at a two-year college and we adopted this textbook for spring 2009. It has turned out to be a real disappointment.

I see three major problems with it. First, it uses many terms it never defines, such as "purpose," "audience," "thesis," "symbolize," et cetera. Definitions for these terms vary, and they also need to be defined as a set, consistently with one another. So telling students to look them up in a dictionary is not adequate. In addition, many of the definitions the book _does_ give are unclear.

Second, the anthologized essays vary greatly in difficulty, and a number of them are far too hard for two-year college students (although they are the stated audience for the book). A reading called "Pomegranates and English Education" uses feminist and anti-colonialist terminology that would puzzle many Ivy League freshmen. Another by Natalie Angier (a writer I admire) introduces terms from evolutionary biology which neither students nor instructors are likely to understand even with the help of a dictionary. Furthermore, the discussion questions after the readings are often either vague or far too leading.

Third, the book seems to have been a rush job. There are misspellings, omitted words, and a rather appalling instance where "flat-chested" is hyphenated as "flatch-ested."

Two-year college students, whose skills are already often not the strongest, really deserve better.

This is a solid textbook for beginning writers. There are some kinks and errors in this first edition, but the essays are interesting reading and can generate great essays. A good choice.