A Community of Writers [antikvár]

Preface We have written A Community of Writers for college freshmen and women in a one-semester writing course.* We've made our book as practical as we can, with lots of hands-on workshop activities. But we don't hide our interest in theory. We push students to become thoughtful about their writing process through regular entries in a writing process diary. Our book reflects much recent scholarship in composition. We have structured our book into nineteen units—each consisting of a set of activities and a writing assignment designed to illustrate an important feature of the writing process (and designed to take up one to two weeks). The units are arranged in a coherent order that provides plenty of direction for teachers who want to follow our lead. (And we've written an extensive instructor's manual for teachers to consult.) But we've also given teachers great latitude by including far too many units for one semester and by making each unit self-contained—so that teachers can completely rearrange the order of the units to suit their own approach or priorities. In addition to the main units, there are ten mini-units—short pieces each devoted to a smaller feature of writing or usage and suitable to be assigned as outside reading or used for a single class meeting. The third part of the book is an unusual feature we're particulariy proud of: a separate booklet called Sharing and Responding, which helps students learn to respond usefully to each other's writing. We've met many teachers who say, "Peer feedback doesn't work," but it's really a matter of giving students more guidance. We've tried above all to make a book that is writerly. Our overriding principle is that we all learn writing best by writing: writing a great deal, in various modes, to various audiences, and with lots of feedback from diverse readers. The book is not a handbook that lays out rules of grammar or guidelines for good usage—nor even principles of good writing. It is a book of writing activities. Yet in taking this writerly—even idealistic—approach we have been mindful of the constraints of the classroom setting: grading; lime cut up artificially into fifty-minute blocks and into semesters or quarters; and the sometimes vexed authority relationships that come from teachers having to teach large groups rather than individuals in a course that is required rather than freely chosen. We have been writing this book for more than three years. We and a number of our colleagues have tried out various drafts of the text in our own classrooms, and we have been able to include samples of student writing derived from these trials in the "Readings" section of each unit. We do not intend these samples as models of excellence to imitate or illustrations of pitfalls to avoid, but simply as examples: a range of what students have written in response to these tasks. We like these pieces—^just as we also like the examples of professional writing that we include with them in the readings. We have purposely mingled the student and professional writing together without differentiation in order to emphasize that we don't think there is anything different in kind that distinguishes student writing from professional writing. For it is a point of principle with us to treat students as writers: people who deserve to be in charge of what they write, who already know a lot about discourse (even when it doesn't *It is also appropriate for a one- or two-quarter course—and perhaps for a full-year course if supplemented with readings. The book will also be useful for high school seniors or college sophomores or juniors—for we haven't much differentiated our audience in terms of age or skill level: we're talking equally to strong and weak students. That is, when we work with unskilled or reluctant students, we find they benefit from working on the same interesting, substantive, and sometimes difficuh writing tasks we ask of our most skilled students—so long as we explain clearly what we are asking and why we are asking it, and give lots of support. On the other hand, even when we are working with very skilled and experienced students, we give lots of encouragement and lake the informal, nontechnical stance you see here. The core of our book is a series of writing activities that we have found appropriate whether we're working with young children or college faculty.