WPA-L and NCTE Connected Community

As you probably know, I posted a short advertisement of this space, inviting people to take a look at what books I had listed for possible review.  I posted to WPA-L and NCTE's Connected Community (for TYCA).  The response was overwhelming!  I received about 50 emails in 24 hours.  It was terrific--the responses came from PhD students to Directors of Composition, from ESL Directors to Lecturers in Humanities.  And already, 6 people are following this site.

All this makes me wonder.  Why?  I've written a half-dozen reviews for TETYC in the past and I've done so because it's one way I can stay sharp--there's something about having to write on a book that makes you focus more in the reading of it.  I know I take notes, consider the responses of different audiences, shape my response--all this in a different way than how I read otherwise. I've served on a "best book" committee and a "best article" committee and I know in reading for them, I am only watching my own responses to the arguments, not on the possible reception of the book or article by other readers.  Perhaps the difference is a subtle one, but I think writing a review requires a kind of split attention: one eye on the text, one eye on the potential audiences.  That split attention, moreover, creates a different kind of reading tension, one that has proven useful to me in knowing the field better.

On the other hand, there's certainly no monetary reward for writing a review.  No one's tenure or promotion is going to be affected by a review in TETYC.  So I wonder why a director of composition at a pretty good sized university is interested in writing a review.  Perhaps I should ask.  That might be an interesting article, in fact, asking reviewers what they get out of it.  (There's probably already a ton written about the genre of book reviews, but I wonder how much there is on the art of book reviewing and how much pertains to an academic journal.)

Thanks for your responses--I think I'm going to get some great reviews in the works soon.

Titles for Potential Review

Here's a list of titles, new and recent releases, that readers of TETYC might find interesting.  If you'd like to review one, let me know and contact the publisher for a copy (or I can do that for you).  As always, if you find something you like on your own, let me know!

Cengage
Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Content, and Style.  Eileen Pollack.
The Research Writer.  John Van Rys, Verne Meyer, Patrick Sebranek.
Techniques for College Writing: The Thesis Statement and Beyond.  Moore and Cassel.
Text Messaging: Reading and Writing About Popular Culture.  Alberti.
The Pop Culture Zone: Writing Critically About Popular Culture.  Smith, Smith, and Watkins.

Fountainhead Press: The "V" Series: (entire or individual volumes)
Green.  Bauknight and Rollins.  (already under review)
Food.  Bauknight and Rollins.
(E)dentity. Vie.
Borders. Baca.
Hampton PressRAW (Reading and Writing) New Media.  Ball and Kalmbach.
Composing Ourselves as Writer-Teacher-Writers.  Bizzaro, Culhane, and Cook.
Inside Multimodal Composition. Morrison.
Performing Feminism and Administration in Rhetoric and Composition.  Ratcliffe and Rickly.
Who Owns School?  Ritter.
Including Students in Academic Conversations: Principles and Strategies of Theme-Based Writing Courses Across the Disciplines.  Rossen-Knill and Bahkmetyeva.
Multiliteracy Centers: Writing Center Work, New Media, and Multimodal Rhetoric.  Sheridan and Inman.

NCTE
College Credit for Writing in High School: The "Taking Care" of Business.  Hansen and Farris.

Parlor Press
Basic Writing.  Otte and Mlynarczyk.
Genre: An INtroduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy.  Bawarshi and Reiff.
Visual Rhetoric and the Eloquence of Design.  Atzmon.
Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing (Vol 1 and 2). Lowe and Zemlianski (http://writingspaces.org/)

Routledge
How to do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit.  Gee.
The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis.  Gee and Handford.

Southern Illinois University Press
Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition.  Holcomb and Killingsworth.
Cross-Language Relations in Composition.  Horner, Lu, and Matsuda.
Everday Genres: Writing Assignments Across the Disciplines.  Soliday.University of Pittsburgh Press
Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies.  Schell and Rawson.
The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education.  Stanley.

Utah State University Press
Beyond Process.  Dobrin, Rice, and Vastola.
Compelled to Write: Alternative Rhetoric in Theory and Practice.  Wallace.
The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives.  Massey and Gebhardt.
Teaching with Student Texts: Essays Toward an Informed Practice.  Harris, Miles, and Paine.
Reframing Writing Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning.  Adler-Kassner and O'Neill.
Going North Thinking West: The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction.  Peckham.
Diverse by Design: Literacy Education in Multicultural Institutions.  Schoreder.
Authoring: An Essay for the English Profession on Potentiality and Singularity.  Haswell and Haswell.
Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement.  Rose and Weiser.
Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action.  Broad, Adler-Kassner, et al.

Back from Atlanta and the CCCC

Hey, everybody.  I just got back from Atlanta and this year's CCCC.  It was a great convention and I had the chance to have lunch with Jeff Sommers, the editor of TETYC, and we talked over the review process of manuscripts.  I've got a bunch of manuscripts in the pipeline and they're all very interesting on timely books.

I also had a chance to visit the publishers' booths.  I got a lot of great leads. Soon, I'll have a list of books and other resources I'd love to see reviews of.  More soon!