Bad Ideas About Writing
BIAW takes on a pretty daunting project: in one volume, collect and debunk misconceptions about good writing, writing students, style, techniques, genres, assessment, technology, and writing teachers. The editors and contributors pull it off with concise and rich explorations of the "literacy crisis" phenomenon (Babb), the assumption that gamification equals fun (Daniel-Wariya), or erroneous high school prophecy that you'll need ________ in college (Hollinger). With eight sections and sixty-two bad ideas, the quality of the collection is consistent and engaging. BIAW is an excellent supplement to a first year writing studies class dealing with problematic misconceptions or a graduate practicum for writing teachers in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. It's also helpful historical index of the stories that we inherit and an engaging call to reframe the public circulation of ideas about what writing is, how learning happens, and who we are as writing teachers and students.
With a host of experts in writing, the collection as a whole takes balanced view and contextualizes each of the bad ideas in terms of origin, longevity, and consequences.
Though most writing teachers wish BIAW was irrelevant, an engaging critique of the many bad ideas that inform our discussions of writing is likely to always be relevant and needed for students and teachers.
Thought the volume contains many voices and many topics, and the necessary historical references to provide detailed histories and analyses, the editors and the authors succeeded in creating a clear and readable collection.
One of the highlights of the BIAW for me is that it sports so many different voices with a consistency in quality and careful exploration of the bad ideas that pre-frame our writing classes.
As I say later in my organization comments, the sections and the arrangement of sections movies from concepts of writing (and writing students) through writing in difference contexts with different tools and lands on the writing teacher as a subject of study. The movement adds to the books clarity and historical unfolding.
The arrangement of the sections in BIAW moves meaningfully from bad ideas about good writing and good writers to bad ideas about writing teachers, beginning with the process(es) under investigation and ending with the people charged with understanding and teaching those processes.
I had no problems with BIAW's interface.
I did not note any grammatical errors, or at least none jumped out that prevented my understanding of the text.
BIAW hosts a range of teacher-scholars with an impressive diversity of backgrounds. With a built-in understanding of diverse language practices, the multifaceted image of writing that emerges offers a range cultural examples and calls for conceptions of writing that are more inclusive than our myths and misconceptions suggest.