Customer Reviews

The Writing Teacher's Sourcebook

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As an English graduate student looking forward to a career of teaching, I have read several books on the subject. This particular text is one of the most useful I've seen so far. The articles cover a myriad of teaching approaches and exercises for potential students.

While not forcing one particular philosophy on the reader, articles by authors like Peter Elbow, Douglas B. Park, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford offer different perspectives on different ares of the teaching process. These articles help the reader decide how important "audience" is, and whether literature has a place in a freshman composition course.

Chapters cover such areas as: "Teachers," "Students," "Approaches," "Perspectives," "Composing and Revising," and "Styles," among other things. This book would be incredibly useful for a new teacher, a potential teacher, or even a student interested in further developing his or her own writing skills. The book offers ideas for a teacher to help a student with typical writing roadblocks: how to start, how to get organized, and how to overcome writer's block. An invaluable tool that has helped me not only develop my own philosophy on teaching, but has also helped me in my own writing process.

This book was a required text for a Composition Theory undergraduate course I took. There are some really good articles in it. Many are definite "dog ear for later review" material.

The Tao Of Writing: Imagine. Create. Flow.
I've been using this book for many years in a graduate course on Teaching Writing. My students are mostly working English teachers getting Masters credits toward certification requirements, and the early readings in this book are a shock to their systems. Berlin's "Ideology" is a primer for graduate school jargon, but it's also a provocative introduction to the theories that have informed our teaching practices. That said, the book helps teachers understand the roots of much of what we do in the writing classroom. It gets them thinking about their own practice, and it teaches them to look cynically at the experts and some of our assumptions about how and what we teach. Finally, after the initial shock students dig in, and class gets interesting.