11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A complete-in-one-volume workshop instruction guide, April 3, 2008
This review is from: The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing (Paperback)
It is a truism that people who have not read the great writers of English literature are less equipped to write as well as those who have. There are lessons available in the writings of such literary giants as Shakespeare, Milton, Conrad, Cicero, Aquinas, Dickens, Joyce, Hemingway, that can improve the narrative skills for written expression for high school students writing term papers, college students striving with creative writing assignments, aspiring authors yearning to see their manuscripts turned into books with the widest and most appreciative possible readership. "The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way To Better Writing" by Gregory L. Roper (Professor of English and Directory of the Writing Program at the University of Dallas) is a complete-in-one-volume workshop instruction guide that can assist anyone from a home-schooled student, to a novice novelist, to an beginning playwright, to aspiring poet to write more effectively, fluently, engagingly, and successfully. Simply stated, "The Writer's Workshop" should be on the supplemental reading list of anyone wanting to successful express themselves through the written word and should be considered a core acquisition for personal, professional, academic, and community library Writing Reference Studies collections.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Works Well in Practice, January 28, 2010
This review is from: The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing (Paperback)
I have successfully used this text with several students online ( [...] ), and I find their creations nicely inspired by Roper's models. I completed the book on my own before designing the course, and I am pleased with my own assignments, too. The process of imitating great writers forces us to really examine what they've done, and it's encouraging to find that we can take on the voice of Sojourner Truth or even of Cicero.
Some of the encouragement to "create a masterpiece" as apprentices in other crafts have done over the centuries is well-meant but not particularly practical. I consider it inspiration.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fresh Approach to Freshman Composition, November 15, 2011
This review is from: The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing (Paperback)
When I read the first paragraph of Roper's preface to the book, I knew I had to try teaching composition from this text. Roper says, "Most composition textbooks these days, though well-meaning, are dreary, predictable affairs." How right he is. Roper proceeds to point out that, not only are the model readings monotonous in content, being predictably center-left in their politics, but the very style of the readings is problematic: "But in some ways worse, for pedagogical reasons, is the monotone in style: all of the texts feature that contemporary conversational essay style so favored by such periodicals [as The New Yorker], a style that hides its very structure, that displays a voice not too distinctive as to offend." I have used this textbook successfully in several composition classes now, and I will continue to use it.
In opposition to contemporary trends in composition textbooks, Roper sets out to write a new kind of composition textbook according to a very old model. Roper insists that students learn to write through imitation. This, he says, is the best way to learning any skill requiring both technical competence and creativity. Musicians, painters, and writers learn their craft by observing a master, attempting to imitate the master's work, and then eventually striking out on their own. I have found this principle to be sound in my own development as a writer, as well as in other arenas.
The textbook is organized so as to build skills--beginning with simple description and narration, the chapters progress through definition, rule-writing, dialectical argument, rhetorical persuasion, and negotiation. Students are asked to write an original composition, given a model passage, and then asked to rewrite the original in the style and structure of the model. The order of chapters makes perfect sense, though I have had success in skipping chapters. The models are almost all classical or medieval, with only a handful of modern models offered. This is excellent because the style is unfamiliar and the structure strange, so the students recognize immediately that they must read carefully.
I have a few minor complaints about the book. In chapters five, six, and seven, the models are heavily Latinate, and while there is nothing wrong with Latinate prose itself, the styles are not obviously distinct from each other, and I'm not sure I want my students getting in the habit of writing such long sentences. I would have preferred more stylistic variety in the last few chapters, and I may provide some of my own model passages the next time I teach the course.
Roper's own style is fresh and lively, which is a welcome relief from most composition textbooks. The endnotes are extremely helpful, too. One of the best features of this book, however, is the way in which it refreshes many of the old, tired topics about which students like to write. Issues like abortion, gay marriage, gun control, the death penalty, and cheerleading being a sport have become the bane of English instructors everywhere, but when a student is forced to address one of these issues within the parameters of a Disputed Question or a Ciceronian Oration, students find that they have to carefully explain and defend their presuppositions and their evidence, and as an instructor I find the essays more interesting if only because of the novel structure and style.
I can see myself teaching from this textbook for a good long time.
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