Adopting an innovative and refreshing approach to the standard college composition/rhetoric reader/manual, Miller and Jurecic have developed a writing guide that balances the value of constructive creativity in writing along with rhetorical acumen. Rather than pack their text with dozens of models of professional writing, Miller and Jurecic design each chapter as an invitation to consider and practice various aspects of a creative approach to composing texts of all kinds.
Using simple chapter titles such as “Paying Attention,” “Asking Questions,” and “Connecting,” the authors model their craft by including within each chapter original essays (which they themselves co-wrote). These essays do not simply model the element of the constructivist approach to writing upon which they focus—the essays discuss how and why a given element (e.g., “encountering difficulty,” “imagining others,” or “learning from failure”) may be used as an integral aspect of developing productive writing habits. Each essay is followed by practice sessions (which are emphatically not essay assignments) and invitations to explore the element or aspect of writing as it used it models of professional writing, only three of which are found at the end of the text. By including a list of essays at the end of each chapter (most of which may be found free of charge on the Internet), the authors avoid producing a bulky text and—wisely—avoid copyright fees that would drive up the cost of their book.
Freed of numbing and formulaic prescriptions for “effective writing,” students will enjoy this refreshing and liberating approach to composition. For example, Miller and Jurecic advocate writing that responds to author-generated questions, writing that explores and discovers—in effect, writing as thinking and learning—rather than writing that hews strictly to the development of a strategically positioned (and often banal) thesis statement that must appear at the end of a soporific introductory paragraph. This text strikes another welcome nail in the coffin of the five-paragraph theme.
Instructors might find it a bit of a challenge to implement this book within a composition course, especially if the course curriculum is restrictively designed by some sort of departmental committee to meet a set of prefabricated standards. I suspect, however, that any effort to adopt Miller and Jurecic’s strategies will yield impressive results both in the quality of the writing that students will produce and in their attitude towards writing itself.