Katie Z. book reviews

Perhaps these will be slightly more comprehensive/coherent than I was in class.

Alfano, Christine L. and Alyssa J. O’Brien. Envision: Writing and Researching Arguments. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 2008. (368 pp., $40.40)

Alfano and O’Brien’s book has a very helpful structure that seems particularly applicable to the English 1000 goal of teaching the writing process. I really appreciated that they addressed how to analyze texts and how to understand argument and persuasion. This approach seems to lend itself to application of self-critique in the classroom. That is, if the students are not just being told how to argue, but how to read argument, they will learn more about how effectively their own writing is progressing.

One of my favorite things about this book is that it uses not only traditional texts, but visual ones as well. For example, each chapter has excerpts from various essays, but different sections of the book focus on political cartoons, advertisements, magazines, web sites, and films. It seems very necessary to address these concerns, particularly since I intend to structure my class to include a number of nontraditional, nonliterary texts.

I did gravitate to this book based on the authors’ use of visual media as a touchstone for examples of argumentation throughout the book. However, I think it might be difficult early on in the course to convey to my students exactly how “reading” a visual argument can help them craft better written arguments. It also seemed like a conflicted use of these media—that is, the authors do recognize the importance of visual media, but it also seems like they are trying to make their book “sexy” enough for student consumption. Also, some of the visual rhetoric they are using might be difficult to adapt in future editions. For example, many of the political cartoons that have been selected are concerned with September 11th, and this seems very applicable to current students and what is immediately understood as political for them, but ten years from now it might not work. The authors’ decision to juxtapose these images with political posters from World War II seems to be the best way to set the works into a larger context.


Hairston, Maxine and Michael Keene. Successful Writing. 5th ed. New York: Norton, 2002. (310 pp., $37.50)

Hairston and Keene have compiled a comprehensive text on how to craft an argument that seemed to limit the process of writing to the actual time spent composing the essay. There is some information on analyzing source material and brainstorming, but these stages of writing did not seem very important to the authors. My favorite features of this book are the sections near the end of each chapter. The authors have included frequently asked questions that students might have, a few exercises to help the students identify techniques in example writings, and exploratory assignments on that are designed to help students incorporate the information into their own writing.

In ways, I found the organization of this book a little confusing. For example, the chapter on “Drafting” comes before the chapters on “Writing Clearly” and “Crafting Paragraphs.” I guess that is where the burden falls to me as an instructor so I could assign readings in the order I think makes the most sense. Also, the excerpted passages from other works seem like they might be confusing to students. The authors include primarily fiction and non-fiction sources to demonstrate argument, but many of the passages do not present an argument that is immediately apparent. Of course, the analysis of argument is going to be a primary goal of an English 1000 classroom, but this book also does not give a lot of emphasis to analyzing other arguments as much as to the student’s need to create an argument. The opening chapters of the book address “What Makes Writing Successful” and “How Writers Write,” but these seem like pretty standard lists of criteria that do not address how to effectively analyze someone else’s work.

One of the weaknesses I noted in this book was the limited information on nonliterary sources. Of course, this might not matter to someone who does not plan to use a lot of nontraditional texts in a course. I think this may have to do with this being the fifth edition of a book originally published in 1981. The chapters on “Considering Design” and “Sending Electronic Communication” seem as if they were added in recent editions in an attempt to keep up with technological advances and the rise of media studies.