JAC Volume 9

Teaching Prose is an engaging conversation about instruction in writing and reading. This book comprises a series of eight long essays and two essay/appendices, treating Composition Theory and the Curriculum, Designing a Course, Classroom Activities, Designing Essay Assignments, Responding to Student Essays, Understanding Prose, Improving Sentences, A Bibliographical Guide to the Profession, Computers and the Teaching of Writing, and Writing in the Non-Writing Class. All the authors are or have been associated with the Cornell Writing Program; all are energetic, well-intentioned, experienced teachers; and all aim to make this book a useful resource for instructors of writing in any discipline. In this regard, readers will find much that is useful here, including a provocative series of assignment sequences, ideas for courses that integrate writing and subject matter, a brief introduction to rhetorical analysis, a common-sensical review of software style analysts and hypertext, and tips for instructors of “non-writing” classes.

Though clearly written and for the most part engaging, the advice offered here seems much too much for the first-time writing teacher, a major part of the intended audience; a more succinct, relentlessly practical discussion—such as Irmscher’s Teaching Expository Writing—would seem more immediately accessible and useful. Instructors in other disciplines are even less likely to negotiate the four-hundred plus fairly dense pages of this volume. For these instructors the demands of their subject matter are already great; they want and need brief, practical, concrete steps they can take to integrate writing into their classes.

If the many strong passages in Teaching Prose miss their intended audience (new teachers of writing and teachers of other disciplines), the volume is even less likely to find a readership among scholar/practitioners of rhetoric and composition. I would guess that most such readers will experience a kind of oddly disjunctive déjà vu as they go through this book: déjà vu because we have already in the field important work on each of the topics treated here; oddly disjunctive because Teaching Prose seems largely uninformed by this work. I find no mention, for instance, of Sarah Freedman or Anne Gere’s work on response to student writing; no discussion of Christensen’s work in mapping the cumulative sentence (referred to here as "non-periodic”); no relation of Linda Rower’s work on problem representation or planning to processes of invention; no use of Mina Shaughnessy’s brilliant insights into the garbled syntax of student sentences, of Mike Rose’s perceptions about writer’s block, of David Bartholomae’s sensitive and provocative analyses of error; and so on. In this regard, the bibliographical guide chapter is the most memorable, not so much for what it discusses as for the subtext of what it Omits.

I do not want to belabor this point, because the authors are not, after all, addressing scholars of rhetoric and composition. In spite of what I see as a fairly idiosyncratic treatment of the field, I am grateful to these talented, committed teachers for turning their attention to improving college-level instruction in writing.