Reviewed are: Stylish Academic Writing Helen Sword The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Steven Pinker

For many generations, writing teachers were able to turn their faces from the deep contradiction of our profession. They could teach writing, an activity whose success depends above all on the relationship between the created text and its rhetorical context, within the single and peculiar context of the classroom. They could have their students read textbooks with a few paragraphs about audience awareness and perhaps a few about defining a purpose while assigning essay after essay written for the same audience (the teacher) and the same purpose (to complete a requirement, to earn a grade). They could assign such tasks to every first-year college student in happy innocence as long as they shared the assumption upon which the universal college composition requirement is predicated: When students write school essays, they develop a set of generalizable skills-in organizing ideas, building paragraphs, controlling syntax,

When a composition teacher incorporated community-based writing assignments into her course, she found that the curriculum did not support students’ transitions to nonacademic settings. Her success in transforming the curriculum suggests that the writing classroom can function not only as a site for “general writing skills in-struction” but also for analysis of rhetorical variation.