Short enough to be synoptic, yet long enough to be usefully detailed, A Short History of Writing Instruction is the ideal text for undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in rhetoric and composition. It preserves the legacy of writing instruction from antiquity to contemporary times with a unique focus on the material, educational, and institutional context of the Western rhetorical tradition. Its longitudinal approach enables students to track the recurrence over time of not only specific teaching methods, but also major issues such as social purpose, writing as power, the effect of technologies, the rise of vernaculars, and writing as a force for democratization.

The collection is rich in scholarship and critical perspectives, which is made accessible through the robust list of pedagogical tools included, such as the Key Concepts listed at the beginning of each chapter, and the Glossary of Key Terms and Bibliography for Further Study provided at the end of the text. Further additions include increased attention to orthography, or the physical aspects of the writing process, new material on high school instruction, sections on writing in the electronic age, and increased coverage of women rhetoricians and writing instruction of women. A new chapter on writing instruction in Late Medieval Europe was also added to augment coverage of the Middle Ages, fill the gap in students’ knowledge of the period, and present instructional methods that can be easily reproduced in the modern classroom.

Reviews

"What a remarkable book, covering such a wide sweep of history. I've relied on it for decades, and now we have this fine revision. It is an essential resource."

--Mike Rose, Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education

"A Short History of Writing Instruction is a thoroughly researched but broadly accessible collection of period pieces by noted historians. To help with the revisions, Editor James Murphy has enlisted David Gold and other younger historihave helped expand the history of rhetoric and composition. The chapters provide detailed studies of pedagogy that are informed by the comparativist and materialist emphases of recent scholarship. The collection should be of particular interest to those who are interested in institutional and sociocultural histories and recent efforts to deepen our engagement with craft. The collection will provide a useful framework for seminars based on primary texts from varied sources."

--Thomas P. Miller, Professor in the English Department and in the Rhetoric, Composition and the Teaching of English Program, University of Arizona

"I hope teachers of writing through all educational levels will be drawn to this volume by its title and will come away with a sense of the richness and complexity of speaking, reading, writing pedagogies in historically specific contexts. This collection makes a strong case for the value of investigating those histories for help with pressing questions about the role of...