I am listening to this audiobook, and Prose has just brought up Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, which I discovered when teaching developmental reading at NOVA’s Loudoun campus several years ago. In the same period of teaching, I also had my English 111 students read John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Several of my students in both classes told me they had already read these books in high school, and I started to question  how I should be choosing book length works for my community college freshman composition students. I have read arguments that it is more pedagogically sound to stick to shorter works; I have also read points in favor of longer readings. As much as I enjoy teaching the long works, I eventually took a break and shifted over to shorter pieces from anthologies. 

Now, though, I am thinking carefully about how to introduce grammar in such a way that is appropriate for college level students. I do not like teaching the basics of grammar because not all students need it, and these lessons take a precious time from activities that promote much higher order thinking. Now, listening to Prose’s book, I think it might actually be the right thing to have college freshman reread texts they may have already been exposed to in high school. This way, their experience will be more ripe for critical thinking, and it will not seem like a waste of time to go in depth on matters of style, diction, sentence construction, etc. if students are already largely familiar with the content of what they are reading, then we can actually study how the writing works.