Reviews for Stepping On My Brother's Head and Other Secrets Your English Professor Never Told You: A College Reader

The average rating for Stepping On My Brother's Head and Other Secrets Your English Professor Never Told You: A College Reader based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-09-22 00:00:00 Jerry Ford There is not much I can say about this book, other than the fact that it was a complete waste of my time. In the introduction, it explains that good writing should, both, interest a reader to the point of "forcing" them to not want to stop reading, and teach something ABOUT good writing, through the reader reading it. Well, SOME of the essays in this collection were either humorous or interesting (though most of them were not), but otherwise I learned literally nothing about writing. To be purposeful, I stopped after every single essay to ask myself, "What could I learn about writing from reading this essay?" and I also wrote in the margins writing techniques I felt were being used, next to the textual example. These techniques consisted, primarily, of anecdotes, metaphor and evidence of research (though no reference was made to the PROCESS of research). Additionally, these essays were not ABOUT reading or writing; rather, they were confessions--an act that had occurred in the writer's life that he or she had never consciously "confessed" of to another person. However, even this "theme" fell flat, because most of the confessions were about either a particular interest (wanting to experience the art of trapeze) or an accident that was in no way premeditated (stepping on your brother's head while you're trying to get up off the couch and not realizing he's parked his head on the floor directly where your feet WILL go). This selection of essays more so made me wonder why these confessions were so importantly labeled as confessions, rather than simply... stories. Also, because in the introduction it states that writing should be taught, to a certain extent, through reading the craft, why isn't there some sort of essay or afterword to "wrap up" HOW these essays work, or WHAT they are teaching about writing, or WHY we should read these essays to learn about writing instead of some other essays--especially since these essays are, for the most part, relatively average and boring? Is it simply because they are written by some big-names in the rhetoric world, such as Mike Rose and Sondra Perl and Lynn Bloom? I would much rather go back and read Stephen King's "On Writing" and find a way of incorporating THAT into my classroom. I absolutely love that "novel," but it would be difficult to integrate into a semester-long class in its entirety. But I would rather rack my brain attempting to do THAT than bother trying to integrate these essays into my classroom. In my personal opinion, these are terrible examples of writing, even as supplement to the personal narrative. Don't bother reading this book if you're already a good writer, or if you need to learn something about writing: you won't learn anything either way, and you won't have fun "not" doing it.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-29 00:00:00 Mark Bradac im not fond of drama but poetry yet still i studied them.. this book studies intrinsic aspect more and how to write one actually, like discovering ideas in a work and how to develop them