New St. Martins Guide to Teaching Writing

This book was written to help the teacher plan and teach your writing classes and help your students become better writers. The theories, tecniques, and methods in the following chapters are based on our own teaching practice; all have been classroom-tested; and as a whole, they represent the greater part of our current knowledge, both theory and practice, about teaching writing. The contents of this book are informed by a three part thesis. First, writing is teachable; it is an art that can be learned rather than a mysterious ability that one either has or does not have. Second, students learn to write from continual trial and error writing and almost never profit from lectures, from teacher-centered classes, or from studying and memorizing isolated rules. Third, the theories and methods included here were selected according to what works. This book is divided into three parts: Practical Issues in Teaching Writing; Theoretical Issues in Teaching Writing; An anthology of Essays.