Preface to Students

It might be tempting to see writing as just one of the many skills in which you’ll have to demonstrate proficiency before having your ticket punched on your way to “higher-level” coursework and a college degree. In truth, writing, and the thinking that comes with it, will be at the center of your college experience. Here’s a brief tour of how to make the most of what this book has to offer. Please note your professor has the ability to add, delete, and reorder the contents of this book so topics may be arranged diferently.

Part I: Chapters 1–5

The first five chapters (Part I) comprise the “knowledge handbook” of The FlatWorld Handbook for Writers. At times, it won’t look or read like the rest of the text because it will seem to be more about thinking than writing or reading. But by the end of Part I, you’ll probably come to see that the three activities—thinking, reading, and writing—are really inseparable.

At other times, the focus in Part I is on you and your motivations for being in college; the chapters will seem to stray pretty far afield from what you would expect from a writing handbook. But good writing is built on the motivation and energy of an engaged writer who has something important to say to someone in particular.

While the rest of the handbook will give you the tools you need to become a better and more polished writer, Part I will help you identify and develop some of the most important attitudes, dispositions, and habits of mind you’ll need for success in college and life.

Chapter 1 (Writing to Think and Writing to Learn) activates the first of these habits of mind: posing productive questions. You will be exposed to a variety of strategies to slow down your thinking and withhold your judgment so that you can use exploratory writing as a way of generating further and deeper questions.

Chapter 2 (Thinking through the Disciplines) activates a second habit of mind: seeing and making connections across the disciplines. You will come to understand that the disciplines you encounter in college, just as the occupations you will someday assume, are always being reconstructed and negotiated by the people engaged in them. The distinct conventions for writing, speaking, and making meaning in each discipline and occupation are constantly being questioned and revised.

Finally, Chapter 3 (Joining the Conversation) introduces you to the final habit of mind: developing a rhetorical awareness. You’ll learn that when you “go public” with your low-stakes writing by finding a medium and a genre, your sense of curiosity, metaphor, humor, and wonderment can actually be enhanced in the presence of an audience.

Chapter 4 (Becoming a Critical Reader) orients you to the next habit of mind: reading texts carefully and critically. You will be exposed to a variety of methods you can use to uncover the biases, assumptions, preconceptions, and implications in the texts you encounter and produce.

Chapter 5 (Managing the Research Process) illustrates how these four habits of mind come together in service of what can be the most daunting writing assignment you might face—a researched project. 

Over the years, you’ve probably been taught (and retaught) how to write in certain academic genres: describing, narrating, explaining, classifying, comparing and contrasting, analyzing, solving problems, persuading, and so on. This handbook doesn’t ignore these genres, but it intentionally avoids structuring its approach around them, for three reasons:

When you do make those decisions about the genres and media that are most appropriate for your rhetorical situation, you’ll be able to make them with the help of the thinking activities of these first four chapters. You will be able to explore the rhetorical stakes of writing for an instructor, a peer group, an entire class, and an audience outside the confines of the academic setting.

As you enter college, either you’ve already learned how to write proficiently in the academic genres listed above from the first twelve (or so) times you took language arts and English classes, or you’re still having trouble. If you already know how to write in these genres, Chapter 1 “Writing to Think and Writing to Learn,” Chapter 2 “Becoming a Critical Reader,” Chapter 3 “Thinking through the Disciplines,” and Chapter 4 “Joining the Conversation” won’t hurt you. Consider it a collection of new strategies for using writing to generate even more productive thinking. If you’re still having trouble, Chapter 1 “Writing to Think and Writing to Learn,” Chapter 2 “Becoming a Critical Reader,” Chapter 3 “Thinking through the Disciplines,” and Chapter 4 “Joining the Conversation” open up a different approach from the usual manner in which you’ve likely been taught writing. Either way, regardless of whether you feel like you’re a good writer, college is the time to try something new.

But ironically, the approach of the FlatWorld Handbook for Writers may not be so “new” after all. It may in fact be about twenty-five hundred years old. After all, the five “canons” (or main subjects) of classical rhetoric were:

You’ll find that very little in this handbook will stray far from these basic principles.