Embracing Writing

Embracing Writing is a book that offers fresh versions of various ideas. Free writing isn't a new idea but how Gary recommends you use it in class and in your own writing is. He doesn't preach or hype about how well it and the other strategies he recommends work. He doesn't tell you to try them, but when you do, you discover he's right and you learn new things about approaches you thought you understood. I so appreciate books that get beyond rehashing the ideas of others, books that build new structures out of familiar ideas, and books that challenge conventional thinking about the way things are or the way we think they have to be. Embracing Writing is about teaching students who don't like to write and don't do it well-that's the book's main focus. It proposes a variety of interesting ways teachers can improve student writing and their attitudes about it-ways that involve the role of writing in the classroom, approaches to rewriting (not revising-Gary makes important distinctions between the two), ways of providing feedback and a whole different orientation to grading. This isn't the way writing is usually taught, in composition courses or any other courses, for that matter. But it's an approach that makes sense and one that offers options to teachers who are regularly or occasionally frustrated by their attempts to teach writing. They are options they may not have considered or perhaps should reconsider. The content of this book rings with authenticity. It is a well-written story of one teacher's 20-year journey to a new and quite remarkable way of teaching, a way that does encourage reluctant writers to embrace writing???. It is a book you'll enjoy reading, a book that will make you think and it could very well be one that will change how you teach and write. -From the foreword by Maryellen Weimer, editor of The Teaching Professor newsletter