I’m going to be attending a workshop in a few days for the National Writing Project.  I’m pretty fired up about this opportunity.  One of the things that they ask, though, is to read a book relevant to writing instruction, and come to the workshop prepared to discuss and present material from it.

For my book, I chose Blending Genres, Altering Styles: Writing Multigenre Papers by Tom Romano.  It has to be one of the strangest books about writing instruction, perhaps about teaching, that I have read.  The book is written as a series of short chapters – some barely more than a page long – and the traditional, expository structure common to most nonfiction, informational books is almost nonexistent.  Some of the chapters put forth major components of the multigenre paper (such as the lead); some offer examples with a sense of context or source; some seem to be musing on the value and importance of multigenre papers; some offer unusual ways of explaining the structure or relationships among the elements of a multigenre paper.  It was sometimes challenging to understand, but the structure of the book follows the rationale of the texts that it promotes.  In other words, the connections among chapters are not always linear or rational; the purpose of each chapter is not always explicitly stated.  The goal is to show a relationship of ideas that helps readers see the value of implicit transitions, the ways that a repeated idea or a linking concept can help unify a text.