The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing

'Relevance,' writes Gregory Roper, 'is overrated.' In most high school and college classrooms today, students suffer through 'dreary, predictable' composition textbooks with a monotone treatment of writing in both content and style. Most examples are magazine articles from such cultural organs as the New Yorker, Atlantic, and Harper's. Certainly laudable examples of contemporary prose can be found among these periodicals, but pedagogically speaking, they lack variety when it comes to style. Their contemporary conversational tone tends to hide its structure in a voice 'not too distinctive as to offend.' English professor and Writing Program director Gregory Roper maintains that learning how to structure composition using these current models is extremely difficult, not to mention fundamentally contrary to the way rhetorical instruction has been taught for roughly two thousand years-that is, by imitation. Highlighting centuries of strange forms, structures, and especially voices, Roper shows how to imitate the masters, and thereby (eventually) gain one's own voice. Examples are taken from a spectrum of writers-Cicero, Joyce, Chesterton, Hemingway, Aquinas, and more-as well as from student samples, proving that, while not necessarily easy, good writing can be learned. The exercises are crucial; this book is meant for doing, not just reading. Also included are reflections on Great Ideas from the Great Books, meant to encourage students to consider writing as an interaction with the larger world of ideas as well as their souls.…