Speaking of Writing: A Brief Rhetoric

Can a writing textbook inform and entertain? Can a very brief rhetoric also function as a stand-alone guide to college writing? Yes and yes. Speaking of Writing is a concise yet comprehensive rhetoric with readings. Informed by scholarship in Writing Studies, this book follows four college students from diverse backgrounds as they face the challenges of reading, writing, and critical thinking in first-year writing and across the disciplines. Each chapter engages students in relatable, often humorous scenarios that focus on key challenges.

Through its story-based approach, Speaking of Writing enacts student-centered and process-based pedagogy, showing students learning to address fundamental questions: How can I apply my own strategies for success to new assignments? How can I maintain my own voice when asked to compose in an academic style? What do college professors mean by a “thesis,” and how is this different from what my high-school teachers meant? Why is this argument weak, and how can I make it stronger? The book’s narrative vividly dramatizes a draft-and-revision process that includes instructor feedback, peer review, and careful research.

Allegra Goodman is a novelist. Her books include Kaaterskill Falls, The Family Markowitz, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, and The Chalk Artist, and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories. She has taught first-year composition at Stanford and creative writing at Boston University. Michael Prince is the founding director of the Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, where he is Professor of English, specializing in Writing Studies and early modern literature and philosophy. His publications include The Shortest Way with Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Deism, and the Novel (2019), which received the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize from the University of Virginia Press. Emmeline Pidgen is an illustrator, creating books, comics, and commercial illustration in northwest England. She has worked with a wide range of clients internationally and was named “UK Freelancer of the Year” in 2016.