The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing

By Gregory L. Roper

Book Overview

The Writer's Workshop takes an approach to teaching writing that is new only because it is so old.

Today, rhetoric and composition typically proceed by ignoring what was done for 2,500 years in Western education. Gregory Roper, on the other hand, helps students learn to write in the way the great writers of the past themselves learned: by carefully imitating masters of the craft, including Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Charles Dickens, Sojourner Truth, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. By living in their workshops and apprenticing to these and other masters, apprentice writers--like apprentice musicians, painters, and blacksmiths of the past--will rapidly improve the complexity of their art and discover their own native voices.

Interspersed into chapters full of sound practical advice and challenging assignments are reflections on Great Ideas from "Realism and Impressionism" to "Nominalism and Modern Science." Perfect for the college or even high school writing classroom--as well as a marvelous book for homeschoolers and others who would like to improve their own writing--The Writer's Workshop is a fine practical guide, and Dr. Roper a friendly yet demanding teacher-mentor.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933859334
• ISBN13: 9781933859330
• Release Date: February 2007
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Works Well in Practice

I have successfully used this text with several students online ( [...] ), and I find their creations nicely inspired by Roper's models. I completed the book on my own before designing the course, and I am pleased with my own assignments, too. The process of imitating great writers forces us to really examine what they've done, and it's encouraging to find that we can take on the voice of Sojourner Truth or even of Cicero. Some of the encouragement to "create a masterpiece" as apprentices in other crafts have done over the centuries is well-meant but not particularly practical. I consider it inspiration.

A complete-in-one-volume workshop instruction guide

It is a truism that people who have not read the great writers of English literature are less equipped to write as well as those who have. There are lessons available in the writings of such literary giants as Shakespeare, Milton, Conrad, Cicero, Aquinas, Dickens, Joyce, Hemingway, that can improve the narrative skills for written expression for high school students writing term papers, college students striving with creative writing assignments, aspiring authors yearning to see their manuscripts turned into books with the widest and most appreciative possible readership. "The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way To Better Writing" by Gregory L. Roper (Professor of English and Directory of the Writing Program at the University of Dallas) is a complete-in-one-volume workshop instruction guide that can assist anyone from a home-schooled student, to a novice novelist, to an beginning playwright, to aspiring poet to write more effectively, fluently, engagingly, and successfully. Simply stated, "The Writer's Workshop" should be on the supplemental reading list of anyone wanting to successful express themselves through the written word and should be considered a core acquisition for personal, professional, academic, and community library Writing Reference Studies collections.