Book Reviews

The authors of Writing As Social Action assert that writing is a form of social action because "It is part of the way in which some people live in the world." Their collection of essays, which draws on scholarship in a variety of disciplines-- rhetoric, philosophy, literary theory, sociology, sociolinguistics, to name a few--suggests many potentially effective teaching strategies and program designs. Cooper, associate professor of English in the Humanities Department at Michigan Technological University, and Holzman, an author of articles on literacy, education, literary theory and literary history, are teachers, and their hands-on approach and philosophy are integral facets of these essays. By viewing writing as social action, they attempt to explain why students are often alienated and why a good portion of the research and theory in writing processes ends up being inapplicable to actual writing pedagogy.

This entire collection of essays is well-written and thought-provoking, even for those not familiar with either Freire or social theories of writing and literacy. Three of Cooper's essays--"Unhappy Consciousness in First-Year English: How to Figure Things Our for Yourself," "The Ecology of Writing," and "Women's Ways of Writing"--are especially intriguing. In "The Ecology of Writing," for example, Cooper argues for abandoning the romance of the solitary writer and instead consider writing as an activity "through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems." She notes that "purposes, like ideas, arise out of interaction." The metaphor Cooper uses for the kind of writing suggested by the ecological model is the web, "in which anything that affects one strand of the web vibrates throughout the whole." Most classroom teachers have seen this metaphor in action; students will often either embrace or reject a teacher's project as a group or as individuals and in doing so, have significant impact on the teacher's agenda. Cooper suggests the teacher take advantage of this aspect of the learning (and writing) process and discover ways, along with students, to interact within the various social systems already present, with an eye, perhaps, to changing them.

This book is particularly rewarding because it is reality- based; the research is the practice of writing with diverse groups of writers in the workplace and the academic world. Sometimes those involved with theorizing forget about actuality, and Cooper and Holzman remind us that "when thinking about writing, we must also think about the way that people live in the world."

Virginia Dumont
Lander College