This article makes a case for using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a tool for skill-based writing instruction in the composition classroom. The novel employs prose strategies such as commonplaces and amplification that become springboards for class conversation about prose style and student writing. Additionally, the novel’s characters admit to difficulties with composition, such as language usage and organization in letter writing, that seem eerily familiar to those voiced by novice writers in a freshman writing course. Mangiavellano contends that students eagerly seek out ways the novel reminds them of their own lives, and he argues that Pride and Prejudice in the composition classroom can reflect back to students versions of their academic selves just as much as it does their personal selves.

This article argues that popular sports media (such as websites, TV shows, and tweets) can be used in the freshman composition classroom to introduce students to academic argument and to encourage them to reimagine their own writing styles. Because sportswriters, broadcasters, and analysts frequently try to persuade someone of something, the intellectual operations that take place in many types of sports writing make them vibrant examples of academic argument. Asking students to read—and ultimately learn—from sports writing, which is often written in a personal, humorous, and experimental style, inspires students to revisit their own writing style and can teach them about the relationship between form and content. Specifically, Gubernatis Dannen uses David Foster Wallace’s essay “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” to demonstrate relationships between content and prose style strategies. For many students, thinking about sports and sports writing opens up larger possibilities of thinking and writing in college.

Although Orwell's essays—particularly “Shooting an Elephant”—are used in freshman composition classes as stylistic models of clarity for student to imitate, this practice is pedagogically unsound because Orwell's essays are examples of the contemplative essay, whose aims are very different from those of the expository prose students learn to write in composition classes.