Becoming A College Writer

Based on 100 interviews with students who had recently finished first-year writing, Todd Taylor's groundbreaking multimedia text is shaped by student writers like no other textbook before. Their words and voices--in brief videos and example texts--create a conversation about writing that asks students to engage with other college writers personally, learning from their challenges and successes. Conceived as a multimedia text in LaunchPad from the outset, the brief, modular chapters are organized into four parts that support the best practices and content areas in the CWPA Outcomes Statement -- Rhetoric, Context, Process, and Convention -- so that you and your students have just what you need in one resource to support writing, working with sources, and multimodal composing.

Becoming a College Writer is an encouraging new writing textbook that places the power of activity- and discussion-based classroom practices into the hands of students. Based on real writing instruction from real college faculty, this book blends a friendly, accessible voice with hands-on activities in the form of: Annotated example papers Helpful and simple writing exercises Practical guides for essential writing skills The writing process Essay structure Paragraph and sentence structure Solutions to common problems These lessons address the necessary skill sets college writers must wield—not as masters, but as growing writers—in a variety of contexts. Built by experienced teaching faculty who work with students at all levels of readiness for college writing, this textbook focuses on providing detailed accounts of the most helpful feedback their students have identified from their assignments. The result is an extremely useful and balanced approach to helping students reach their maximum potential as a writer, all without bogging them down with too much information. Each lesson is further illustrated by diagrammed examples of what good writing looks like. These examples are formed by showing a typical but problematic example that struggling students might write first, followed by step-by-step instructions to improve that writing in the moment, simultaneously teaching the skills needed to do it the improved way in the future. Finally, a value-packed appendix provides exercises in revision and proofreading, demystifying these processes that so many students forego in order to turn their hurried assignments in on time. Becoming a College Writer gives students a reason to slow down, look twice, and hone their writing: perhaps the most important step of the writing process.

When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing. You are reading to learn about writing. Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a particular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?

An important challenge to what currently masquerades as conventional wisdom regarding the teaching of writing. There seems to be widespread agreement that—when it comes to the writing skills of college students—we are in the midst of a crisis. In Why They Can't Write, John Warner, who taught writing at the college level for two decades, argues that the problem isn't caused by a lack of rigor, or smartphones, or some generational character defect. Instead, he asserts, we're teaching writing wrong. Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged. Worse yet, it hasn't prepared them for writing in the college classroom. Rather than making choices and thinking critically, as writers must, undergraduates simply follow the rules—such as the five-paragraph essay—designed to help them pass these high-stakes assessments. In Why They Can't Write, Warner has crafted both a diagnosis for what ails us and a blueprint for fixing a broken system. Combining current knowledge of what works in teaching and learning with the most enduring philosophies of classical education, this book challenges readers to develop the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and habits of mind of strong writers.