Living Room ― Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World

How can students find--or make--spaces where their ideas and arguments can be heard? Welch (English, University of Vermont) takes up this question in an age defined not only by YouTube and MySpace, but also by the conversion of public streets into festival marketplaces, the creation of cordoned-off and tucked-away "free speech zones," and the state sanctioning of ethnic profiling. She traces the erosion of publicity rights to post-9/11 legislation, and to 30 years of neoliberal privatization of space, institutions, and resources. She looks to the 20th century's struggles for labor and civil rights for inspiration in helping students understand how to deliver effective arguments and how to shape their arguments using genre, collaboration, audience, tone, and style. There is no subject index. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Nancy Welch is the author/coeditor of the Boynton/Cook titles Living Room (2008), The Dissertation and the Discipline: Reinventing Composition Studies (2002), and Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction (1997). She is Professor of English at the University of Vermont, where she teaches composition, rhetoric, literacy studies, and women's studies. She has also published a collection of short stories, The Road from Prosperity.