Textbook Review

A number of you may not have taken a composition course before and thus have little or no idea about how to teach communicative activities, such as summary, analysis, synthesis, and argument, that might seem natural or second nature to you. Our course addresses this situation in at least two ways. First, as a class we’re reading a number of chapters from Comer’s Writing in Transit, a text designed to inform both first-year and subsequent writing courses. Second, you will familiarize yourself with another composition textbook and write a brief review.

Purpose and Audience

The purpose of the review is to get you to ferret out the pedagogical approach and assumptions of authors who have ample experience teaching first-year writing while also evaluating the effectiveness of the textbook for promoting the teaching and learning of writing. The audience for this review is your classmates, all of whom will be teaching first-year writing in upcoming semesters and who will be making decisions about which textbooks to adopt or to use as aids to planning their courses and/or daily lessons.

Approach

You can begin your evaluation by

Examining the paratext. Prefaces for students and teachers are especially helpful. Companion websites can also provide insight.
Skimming through the entire book as you evaluate content, design, and tone.
Reading one or two chapters (perhaps those of interest to you as you develop your courses) more carefully.

To inform your review, you might consider these questions suggested by Kory Lawson Ching, though as he notes, you shouldn’t try to answer them all!

How is the book organized? What is the logic of its organization? How is it sequenced? Is it built around assignments or topics? Which ones?

What is the textbook’s conception of writing? What does it say, either explicitly or implicitly, about what writing is? To what extent does the textbook focus on the writing process?

What is the textbook’s theory of learning? What does it say or imply about knowledge or skill acquisition?

What is the textbook’s conception of student writers? What does its author(s) seem to assume about composition students? Are students figured as blank slates, members of a community of learners, individual selves in need of actualization, or something entirely different?

In what ways might the textbook shape the practices of the teacher or classroom that uses it? In what ways might it enable or constrain certain approaches to writing instruction?

What is the dominant “narrative” of the textbook? (See Kail’s article.)

What is the overall tone of the textbook? How does it address its student readers? What impact is this tone likely to have?

You might also consider this textbook review written about They Say/I Say by John Edlund as well as the approach undertaken by Beverly Bragg in her review of Everyone’s An Author.

Coverage

Start with a bibliographic citation of the textbook followed by the page total and price. Use MLA formatting.

Then, your review should (in no specific order)

Recommend (however qualified) whether and why someone should or should not use this text.
Provide an overview of the book’s organization and, perhaps, intra-chapter structure.
Summarize what the textbook is about and tease out (perhaps with the help of the questions above) its pedagogical approach. Consider weighing the various features of the text against each other. Does something really make this textbook stand out? Is there a significant negative feature that an instructor should consider before adopting this book?
Use evidence from the textbook to support your evaluation.
Connect to the scholarly conversation about writing/composition (when possible, given the limited reading we’ve done so far this semester).

Format and Submission

Try to keep your review between 500-750 words (a little longer is okay, but try to economize: you don’t have to be exhaustive).
Use MLA style guidelines (see sample paper here).
Attach or embed your review to a post on your portfolio site and email me the URL to that post.