Reviews five books: Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing, by Mina Shaughnessy; Telling Writing, by Ken Macrorie; Writing without Teachers, by Peter Elbow; Structured Reading, by Lynn Quitman Troyka and Joseph W. Thweatt; Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, by Stephen D. Krashen.

Peter Elbow reiterates his philosophy of teaching writing, including to start with personal and experiential writing, to look more at how the writing does and doesn’t work rather than the "quality" of the writing, to use lots of freewriting.