Textbook Review

Textbook Review: The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing
After reviewing, The St. Martin’s Guide to the Writing by Rise Axelrod and Charles Cooper: Ninth Edition, I would strongly recommend this textbook to new instructors teaching first year writing at Texas Wesleyan University. In this review, I will summarize what the textbook is about, identify pedagogical influences I have seen in the textbook’s content, and weigh the various features of the text that makes this textbook stand out.
The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing is designed to be a flexible composition textbook for instructors and a helpful guide for students. Axelrod and Cooper provide a step-by-step guide to writing specific kinds of essays in this textbook. The text helps build on the actual writing processes of students and does even more to prepare them for writing they will do in other college courses. As a rhetoric and reader, The St. Martin’s Guide can serve as a comprehensive introduction to discursive practice. It comprises several parts:
• Part I, Writing Activities, presents nine different essay assignments, all reflecting actual writing situations that students may encounter in and out of college, kinds of discourse that they should learn to read critically and to write intelligently. Among the types of essays included are autobiography, explanation, position paper, proposal and literary interpretation.
• Part II, Critical Thinking Strategies, collects in two separate chapters, practical guides for invention and reading. The catalog of the invention stratagies includes annotating, summarizing, exploring the significance of figurative language, and evaluating the logic of an argument.
• Part III, Writing Strategies, looks at a wide range of essential writers’ strategies: paragraphing and coherence, logic and reasoning, and the familiar modes of presenting information, such as, marration, defining and classifying.
• Part IV, Research Strategies, discusses field as well as library and Internet research and includes thorough guidelines for using and documenting sources, with detailed examples of MLA and APA documentation styles.
• Part V, Writing for Assignment, covers essay examinations, showing students how to analyze different kinds of exam questions and offering strategies for writing solutions.
• The Handbook, is a complete reference guide covering grammar, word choice, punctuation, mechanics, ESL problems, sentence structure and usage. Provides student examples throughout so that students will see errors similar to the ones in their own essays.
Axelrod and Cooper took on a classical tradition of teaching writing not only as a method of composing rhetorically effective composition but also as a powerful guide for thinking creatively and critically. The textbook adds elements of critical and collaborative pedagogy that can make possible social and personal empowerment and transformation. Each chapter promotes critical thinking. In Part I, it concludes with three metacognitive activities to help students to become aware of what they have learned about the process of writing, about the influence of reading and writing, and about the social and political dimensions of the genres they have learned to write. According to Ann George, in Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy, she states that “critical pedagogy reinvents the roles of teachers and students in the classroom and the kind of activities they engage in” (George 93). Axelrod and Cooper emphasize this idealogy in their textbook by believing that writing is both a social act and a way of knowing. The textbook also has activites to stimulate collaboration. At the start of each of the writing chapters, there is a collaborative activity that invites students to try out some of the thinking and planning they will be doing for the kind of writing covered in that chapter. Then, following each reading comes connecting to Culture and Experience, designed to provoke thoughtful responses about the social and political dimensions of the reading. According to Rebecca Moore Howard, “when teachers are no longer dispensing knowledge in lectures but are guiding students in the collaborative process of discovering and constructing knowledge, students are empowered” (Howard 57). This textbook empowers the students.
There are many features that make this textbook stand out. The text’s cover is a cheerful, soothing, cool green that invites the student to use it. The textbook is well organized and easy to use by both the instructor and student. There is a lot of visual rhetoric throughout the text with designs that highlight collaborative activities, lists of basic features, guidelines for peer review, etc. I believe this is an effective textbook for first year writing due to the content having practical guides to writing, the systematic integration of reading and writing, activities to promote group discussion and inquiry, and activites that encourage students to reflect on what they have learned.
The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing would be a superb textbook for a new instructor teaching first year writing at Texas Wesleyan University. The textbook will help students learn to write critically and effectively. Also, the text is very easy to follow, combining reading instruction with writing instruction. Overall, the textbook would be beneficial to the student as well as the instructor.