Habits of the Creative Mind

by Richard E. Miller

Habits of the Creative Mind is not another textbook. Instead, Habits of the Creative Mind is a series of guideposts taking your students off the beaten path of five paragraph essays and rote responses. Portable and flexibly arranged, it works beautifully alone or as a supplement to other materials. In this refreshingly conversational volume, your students will learn to trust and refine their own thinking and improve their writing—at all skill levels. They will have access to Richard E. Miller’s and Ann Jurecic’s much acclaimed, truly unique approach to posing and exploring questions, and facing complexity—in which there are no limits to how far a student may go with his or her thinking and writing. Instantly accessible and instantly flexible, all your students need to do is dive in anywhere in the book and be ready to try something new. And throughout, they will benefit from innovative, manageable exercises—which may be completed in any order—to help them along the way.

In the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, the Council for Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project all affirm the need to shift the emphasis in writing instruction to habits of mind. This book answers that call—and gives your students the tools they need to rise to the occasion.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Education, Textbooks, School

382 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 17, 2015

Reviews

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really like this book--it's a great approach to composition, focusing on conscious creation and research. I'm requiring it in my English 1101 course this fall.

[Jessica Geist · Rating 5 out of 5]

This shatters textbook expectations. There were so many wonderful creative prompts for not only undergraduate students writers but writers of all ages.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adopting an innovative and refreshing approach to the standard college composition/rhetoric reader/manual, Miller and Jurecic have developed a writing guide that balances the value of constructive creativity in writing along with rhetorical acumen. Rather than pack their text with dozens of models of professional writing, Miller and Jurecic design each chapter as an invitation to consider and practice various aspects of a creative approach to composing texts of all kinds.

Using simple chapter titles such as “Paying Attention,” “Asking Questions,” and “Connecting,” the authors model their craft by including within each chapter original essays (which they themselves co-wrote). These essays do not simply model the element of the constructivist approach to writing upon which they focus—the essays discuss how and why a given element (e.g., “encountering difficulty,” “imagining others,” or “learning from failure”) may be used as an integral aspect of developing productive writing habits. Each essay is followed by practice sessions (which are emphatically not essay assignments) and invitations to explore the element or aspect of writing as it used it models of professional writing, only three of which are found at the end of the text. By including a list of essays at the end of each chapter (most of which may be found free of charge on the Internet), the authors avoid producing a bulky text and—wisely—avoid copyright fees that would drive up the cost of their book.

Freed of numbing and formulaic prescriptions for “effective writing,” students will enjoy this refreshing and liberating approach to composition. For example, Miller and Jurecic advocate writing that responds to author-generated questions, writing that explores and discovers—in effect, writing as thinking and learning—rather than writing that hews strictly to the development of a strategically positioned (and often banal) thesis statement that must appear at the end of a soporific introductory paragraph. This text strikes another welcome nail in the coffin of the five-paragraph theme.

Instructors might find it a bit of a challenge to implement this book within a composition course, especially if the course curriculum is restrictively designed by some sort of departmental committee to meet a set of prefabricated standards. I suspect, however, that any effort to adopt Miller and Jurecic’s strategies will yield impressive results both in the quality of the writing that students will produce and in their attitude towards writing itself.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for teachers of freshman composition. Ultimately, along with the successful habits of college level writing, our hope is to instill a sense of curiosity in our students. This book has so many good ideas and tangible ways to get there.

[Henry Desai · Rating 1 out of 5]

An unoriginal list of truisms thst thinks itself far more revolutionary than it actually is.

[Angie Stark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book on writing!

[Kelly Sauskojus]

what a delightful fyw textbook

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a textbook, Habits of the Creative Mind is highly readable. The "chapters" of this textbook read like tiny meditations over how the writing process occurs. There is no prescription- only exploration. The readings by Coates, Lapore, and Sontag add an extra dimension to the discourse, with each reflecting on elements of race, gender, and media respectively, amongst other subjects. For a teacher, this is incredibly useful, allowing Habits of the Creative Mind to be easily paired with other readers. For a student, this may serve well too as the book reads as of the writers actually wanted to write it. Because of that, and because the sections include topics such as unlearning, why high school teachers commonly teach poor writing to their students, and how perception relates to writing, Habits of the Creative Mind serves as an excellent complementary text if not a dominant text in a class. My chief complaint is that the lessons included within it do not always seem practical to me, but that doesn't make the text any less valuable for teaching first year writing.

[Sloane · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-organized textbook on teaching rhetoric. Assigned reading.