Abstract

A Short Course in Writing provides a good occasion to ask what makes a textbook in rhetoric and composition a classic. The fact that Bruffee's book is among the first to appear in the Longman Classics in Rhetoric and Composition series cannot be attributed, after all, to its commercial success. In his review of the original manuscript of A Short Course , Richard Beai, the most prominent English editor at the time, told Paul O'Connell, who published the first edition at Winthrop in 1972, that Bruffee could either alter the book and sell a lot of copies or publish the book as is and make history.1 What Beai predicted has indeed come to pass. As A Short Course appeared in subsequent editions (the 2nd from Winthrop in 1980; the 3rd from Little Brown in 1985; and the 4th from HarperCollins in 1993), it has influenced, far out of proportion to its sales, the actual practices of writing instruction and, more broadly, of educational reform in U.S. college composition.

Journal
Writing Center Journal
Published
2008
DOI
10.7771/2832-9414.1713
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