Yesterday, I reviewed a manuscript for a new first-year composition textbook and reader. Part of the reason for my ability to review the text is that last year I taught from Stuart Greene and April Lidinsky's From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader, a text that the editors and the publisher of this new manuscript see as competition. I thought it would be an interesting opportunity, and the decent honorarium made the opportunity even more appealing. Though after the hours and hours, I am not sure if the $125 was worth it.
Below is an excerpt of one of my answers on the review questionnaire. I was asked to comment on the text's project which was outlined by the prospectus.
What is perhaps most appealing about the prospectus is the text’s emphasis on cross-disciplinary connectedness, on genuine WAC conversations, and on the importance of focusing almost exclusively on academic, scholarly work (which the prospectus argues current WAC texts fail to do). The prospectus emphasizes the importance of argumentative prose, of providing models for students to look to, and of providing contemporary readings to indicate to students that the work they are engaged in is part of ongoing conversations.
These attributes which make the text so compelling also point to the ways I see it as potentially problematic (though these problematics would likely not prevent me from adopting it for my class). In the prospectus’s insistence on seeing cross-discipline connectedness, I worry that it could ignore or gloss over the very important differences and disconnections between writings in separate disciplines. While I definitely understand and appreciate the text’s desire to point out that similar conversations and inquiry projects are being taken on in a variety of disciplinary locations, it is easy (but irresponsible) to erase differences in disciplinary writing. While the text does acknowledge that it will have to address differences, I worry that it will not take into account the ways that very specific disciplinary genre features are indicative of greater epistemological and ontological differences between disciplines. I would encourage the writers to consider some of the recent work done in genre studies that examines the relationships between genre and ways of being and thinking in the world. Writing is always situated rhetorical discourse, and ignoring its situatedness would be irresponsible.
I also remain somewhat dubious about the potential for a course to prepare students to write across the disciplines. No course has the time to allow students practice in writing for all disciplines. Such a goal also assumes that one can forget the situatedness of the particular classroom in which the text is being taught. All courses are situated by the department in which they are housed and by the instructor who is teaching the class. Perhaps more important than that impossible goal of preparing students to write in every disciplinary context is the teaching of ways of recognizing discourse features, to see which disciplines employ particular discourse features, and to allow for a discussion of why particular discourse features are found in given disciplines and why they are absent in others.
I also think that the prospectus’s criticism of textbooks which include sections of writing from outside of the academy seems contradictory to the prospectus’s insistence on the importance of a WAC/WID reader. The prospectus chastises traditional single-discipline (humanities) writing instruction for being too insular and failing to address the ways that similar discussions are going on in other disciplines, but then the prospectus seems very invested in seeing the academy’s insularity. Wouldn’t there be a benefit in showing that conversations occurring in academic spheres are also being explored by the general population, in popular genres? This contradiction in the rationale in the prospectus reveals one of the text’s key weaknesses—its failure to address the ways that new media sources are impacting and changing the ways that academic writing is disseminated, cross-disciplinary work is being facilitated, and the ways that new media is allowing for changes in discourse features.
