Book highlight: English Prof. James Heffernan's "Writing: A College Handbook"

Posted 12/15/00

Writing: A College Handbook
By James A. Heffernan, Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing,
John E. Lincoln and Janet Atwill
W.W. Norton & Company

The ability to express oneself in writing is essential to a student's academic success. At the college level, professors take for granted students' ability to write well and writing instruction is often unavailable. Students now have a new ally in James Heffernan's book, Writing: A College Handbook, now in its fifth edition. Heffernan begins with the fundamentals, but later chapters -- designed to strengthen students' research methods, rhetorical power and proofreading skills -- augment these rudimentary lessons. Part 1, "The Process of Writing," teaches the basic elements, from preparing a topic to proofreading and document design. Part 2, "Crafting Sentences", explains how to write grammatically correct sentences. Proper punctuation is explicitly defined in Part 3, "Punctuation and Mechanics." In Part 4, "Research and Writing," Heffernan et al cover one of the most daunting tasks of any class--the research paper. The chapter begins with an in-depth lesson on the research process, from choosing an appropriate topic to taking notes. Special attention is given to web research, providing precise instructions for doing a thorough web search and giving guidelines for recognizing and documenting credible sources. Part 5, "Writing in Academic Contexts," and Part 6, "Writing in Nonacademic Contexts," cover the necessities of college writing, but also include topics of potential interest to students after graduation, such as grant writing, writing for public service, and writing for your rights. The book is extremely detail-oriented, the well-designed examples and challenging exercises make understanding the concepts easy and ensure improvement along the way. Publisher W.W. Norton lists Writing: A College Handbook as one of its two most popular writing texts on its Web site devoted to freshman writing instruction, http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/wach5/. The following excerpt represents the authors' philosophy:

Good writing is not simply the absence of grammatical error, but the presence of rhetorical power...While identifying the mistakes commonly made in student writing and showing them how to correct them, we emphasize what student writers can do rather than what they can't or shouldn't do. Above all, we try to show them how to generate the kind of writing the informs, excites, delights, and persuades the readers for whom it is written.