Andrew's textbook reviews

Ruszkiewicz, John, Daniel Anderson, and Christy Friend. Beyond Words: Reading and Writing in a Visual Age. New York: Pearson, 2006.
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The majority of Beyond Words, it seems to me, is dedicated to helping students do analysis. The book’s greatest strength is that it gives students tools to analyze visual as well as alphabetic texts. To this end, the book presents a variety of interesting, unconventional examples of traditional and nontraditional texts to be seen, read, and analyzed. The book aims to teach literacy by holding up the ways people talk about themselves, their communities, and their world to scrutiny. Mixing bright, color pictures with fascinating articles, Beyond Words includes hundreds of examples of texts that seem relevant to the experiences of college freshmen in 2007, (hopefully) making reading the book less of a chore. Learning to analyze is meant to be an enjoyable task, as well; throughout each chapter, the book includes questions and activities to lead students to use and develop the analytic skills to compose texts themselves.
The biggest weakness of this book is that it spends only a few pages giving students the tools necessary to compose an English 1000 essay. The last of the book’s eight chapters is the only one to present any kind of direction to students who have already done analysis and wish to compose an argument. Having worked in the writing lab, I know that students need to know how to write a thesis statement, how to organize an argument, and how to develop evidence, as much as they need to know how to analyze a text (if not more so). Therefore, I do not think I will use this textbook in my class because it does not help students as much to develop the fundamental skills that I think are essential for writing the college essay.

Latterell, Catherine G. Remix: Reading + Composing Culture. Boston, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.
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I read this book after I completed my work with Beyond Words. At first glance, I appreciated the fact that Remix includes similarly engaging articles that are in-line with the readings in Beyond Words. Like Beyond Words, Remix aims to lead students to develop tools to read and analyze American pop culture, leading me to believe that both books will seem not-as-relevant in a few years unless they each undergo revision. These books differ in the sense that Beyond Words explicitly states that it aims to teach students to analyze visual as well as alphabetic texts; Remix seems more concerned with analyzing culture, without focusing on differences in the medium of a particular text within that culture.
Remix is a less colorful book; while Beyond Words used color on nearly every page, Remix’s page use only black, white, and shades of grey.
Remix even leads students through the same steps as Beyond Words, teaching students to “ask questions,” to “identify cultural assumptions,” to “test assumptions by considering context,” and to “write critically (remix).” The book is divided into seven chapters:
I. Identity
II. Community
III. Tradition
IV. Romance
V. Entertainment
VI. Nature
VII. Technology
Each chapter of Remix begins with a set of assumptions about the topic. Students are encouraged to question these assumptions through analyzing the set of readings following the assumptions. A vast majority of this book is composed of more than 50 engaging, interesting articles that deal with relevant topics to college freshmen. I found that I couldn’t stop reading some of the articles once I started because they were so fascinating. Each chapter concludes with a section of questions and activities, leading students to think and write critically about these topics and about culture in general.
As much as I liked the content of Remix, I can’t see myself using it in my class. I did not find much instruction concerning the composition of an argumentative paper. This book dedicated an even smaller portion to this topic than Beyond Words.
However, I did really like the organization of Remix. For my class, I would like to focus on American college culture instead of American culture in general. In my class, I might teach my students to use the same process as they analyze college culture as the book uses to analyze American culture.