writing

Forget all the reviews beneath that say this book isn't for college students. These stodgy English Professor types are exactly the audience who are guarenteed to hate a book that promotes and teaches, passion, curiousity, and most important, voice in student research papers. For the rest of us the Curious Researcher is a breath of fresh air. Bruce Ballenger comes at us from a writers, not a teachers point of view. He illustrates how to transform what is traditionally known in the trade as a "terminal paper" into an exploration, brimming with life, fact and literary panache.
He also manages to squeeze in all the fundamental research skills and gives teachers exercizes on how to teach them. Any teacher who sees this book as a "huge waste of time," (see review below) might want to take their cue from UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. "No one is too old to learn the fundamentals." Ballenger brilliantly teaches the fundamentals of teaching voice in non-fiction writing and demonstrates his lessons on each page throught the example of his own writing. This is the Best Book on Research Writing for College or High School ever written. Bravo Bruce!

My 200-level college English class is using this as a textbook, and I've been very disappointed with it. It's simply not a college level text. While it is very user-friendly, the material it covers is all stuff a student should have learned long before college. Things like how to write a thesis statement, organize a paper, use libraries and the Internet, evaluate sources for quality, take notes, incorporate quotes into a paper, avoid plagiarism, properly cite sources, use appropriate word choice and sentence variety, and the standards of proper English conventions should all have been taught in middle school / junior high. At this level, the book has been largely useless to me, as it only covers things I already know. The exercises, too, are redundant of little help.

This book would, however, be an excellent text to use in middle school, or even high school. The skills Ballenger teaches here are important, but they should be taught much earlier than college. The format is easy to read, and much less intimidating than many other such books. It's not at all "dry" like so many texts. Ballenger makes frequent use of nice analogies to help the reader understand how certain elements of a paper will help it or harm it. He also gives examples from his students' own papers, which can be very useful. Included in the book are references to valuable Internet research sites, and appendices that cover proper MLA and APA citations. If used earlier in school, this book would be a valuable resource.

Easy to teach from and the students say that they both learn from it and enjoy it. Most intend to keep the book to refer back to. It is my first choice for a research writing class text.