Customer Reviews

Writing: A Manual for the DigitalAge, Brief, 2009 MLA Update Edition

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Blakesley and Hoogeveen offer an informative, visually engaging, comprehensive guide to academic writing which dedicated students should find useful in school and beyond. It assumes no prior knowledge of writing, making it great for inexperienced students. Its organization is straightforward enough to support both class reading assignments and use as an ad hoc reference.

The key is its intensely visual nature. Inspired by the fact that today's students are weaned on the Web rather than print, it has a dual approach. Each page is split into text-rich explanations of complex points on the margin side, coupled with graphs, images, pull text, bullet lists, and other short, punchy content on the binding side. Traditional-age students will probably appreciate this approach.

Our authors also impress with their thoroughness. They dedicate copious page space to issues that I struggle to convey in classroom lectures: topics like research, critical reading, stylistic choices, and grammar and mechanics. There's a chapter for ESL students on English's hidden quirks--common these days, but still something I appreciate, since it's a continual problem.

We also have chapters on writing for a multimedia environment. Since many teachers and professors come from a less technologically rigorous generation, this is something we (and by "we" I mean "I") can appreciate and use. Writing for the Web is an increasingly necessary part of the composition process, and one too many of us just haven't savvied.

The book's main shortcoming is also one of its virtues. I worry about the highly visual nature, as many professors still want students to write in black and white. I fear that students, who often already place too much faith in technology to carry their work, will think this is what their papers should look like. But for this information-rich content, that's a chance I'm willing to take.

Though pricy, this is a book students can take with them from high school through their entire undergraduate careers, and beyond. I wish I'd had a book like this during my Luddite college years. It's complete enough to be useful, engaging enough to be readable, and light enough to be portable. In other words, it's just what most writing students need.