Elements of Alternate Style: Essays on Writing and Revision

Elements of Alternate Style contributes to a better understanding of the writing process in general and the stylistic options available to every serious writer. It demonstrates how by teaching alternate and traditional styles in tandem, by focusing on revision as invention, we can help students become newly engaged with their texts-even "school writing."

In this edited collection, successful classroom instructors explore and apply these ideas, drawing from composition pedagogy, creative writing technique, and critical theory. The six essays in Part I delineate an initial classroom sequence. . The authors ask writers to try writing exercises and to reconsider how they have constructed essays in the past-how they might reconstruct them today by looking and looking again, by fracturing and creating double voices, by reconsidering the place of research. Part II pushes these explorations further in five essays that contend that writing is about taking risks, trying (sometimes failing), learning from exploration, from play, from radical twists and turns. Part III engages even broader issues of identity, technology, correctness, and editing.

Elements of Alternate Style is a powerful, liberating resource that validates innovative writing instruction and offers a rich array of voices and techniques.