Rethinking Your Writing: Rhetoric for Reflective Writers (Practices & Possibilities)

With its emphasis on both rhetoric and reflection, Rethinking Your Writing foregrounds the inquiry and decision-making processes that help writers succeed in today's writing task—and transfer that learning to the next one. Students are invited to move beyond “just do it” writing to more deliberately predict, problem-solve, and reflect throughout their process.

Created from the start as an online book, Rethinking also helps support instructors as they engage students with many kinds of writing tasks, from typical first-year assignments like narratives and research-based arguments to writing that happens in response to more complex rhetorical situations, such as community-based writing, writing in multiple genres, and writing across disciplines:

The modular, cross-linked design helps faculty assign and students locate information needed for any writing situation.
In-depth, student-friendly sections guide students’ thinking on vital but less visible elements of writing, such as threshold concepts, rhetorical analysis, reflective practice, peer review, writers’ dispositions, critical reading, research processes, and questions of equity.
A book-wide focus on how writers choose their approaches based on their goals, resources, and constraints supports learners who are exploring new genres and audiences, and lays the groundwork for discussion of how writers use tools like Generative AI.
More than 70 innovative writing exercises help writers explore and practice relevant strategies.

In Rethinking Your Writing, E. Shelley Reid provides a versatile guide that can be tailored to the needs of almost any course or classroom. Whether you select a single module to supplement your current resources or use the text throughout your course, this book is designed to help you engage your students and deepen their understanding of how writers learn and succeed in school, their careers, and beyond.

E. Shelley Reid is Associate Professor of English and Executive Director of the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at George Mason University. Her work on teacher preparation, mentoring, and writing education appears in Composition Studies, College Composition and Communication, Pedagogy, To Improve the Academy, Writing Program Administration, and Writing Spaces.