Thinking and Writing in the Humanities

This ambitious textbook tries to both serve as a writing manual and a style guide. While the writing instruction is generally well-executed, it does not stand alone as a style manual. This text goes into great detail about styles of rhetoric, logic and presentation, including a lot of great examples of potential topics to write about in the Humanities, be it theater, music, poetry, literature, architecture, sculpture or painting. Many of the examples are bad examples, however, to the point that the bad examples often outnumber the good by 10:1. It would really have been more helpful to see more good examples, though the bad examples were great in that they show writers what to avoid. My favorite inclusion in the writing section are the succinct summaries of principles that are often presented in bullet point format. While the paragraphs of the text have often long-winded elaborations on these succinct points, I've found the core principles very fundamental and very helpful to the development of my own writing and thinking. The style manual aspect leaves something to be desired. While most main topics in style are addressed (in-text citations, punctuation, formatting, etc...), the basic reality is that any bibliography will have as many exceptions to the norm as it will have the norm. This text just doesn't have the depth of a real style manual to merit its use. However, there are a number of student papers that are correctly formatted according to MLA and CMS styles (a number of each MLA and CMS), and these are quite helpful. They take up so much space, though, that I wish the authors had included one or two good examples of complete papers and used the rest of the page count to include a real, comprehensive style guide. For what it is, this book is a nice addition to the writing library of any arts student. It needs a supplemental style guide, though, so find and buy one that works for your class.

This book really helped me in my advanced college writing class. It serves as a great reference for all sorts of writing. I really liked reading the in-depth descriptions of how to go about writing a research paper, an analysis paper, and more. It provides great outlines and sample essays to look at (this was the best part); something that helps me get going on the writing process. Another great thing about this book is that it addresses the specific areas in the humanities, so there's something for everyone. Also, in the back, there's a really useful handbook that addresses things like word choice, sentence structure, and punctuation; that makes for a great resource. My one complaint about the book would be that sometimes it provides samples that are wrong, and does not show the correct way of going about things. For example, on page 50, the book lists faulty analytical statements and then addresses what is wrong with them. I would have liked to have seen not only what is wrong, but also an example of how to make it right. That said, this is a great book for writing students in the humanities.

This book is written is such a way that makes it easy to read and each section spells out the information in an easy-to-follow format. At times, I found myself flipping back to certain sections because I remembered something I wanted to double-check, etc. and I could find it with little problem. The voice isn't necessarily exciting, but it's not so boring that it's unreadable. The text does present everything in a strict and static way, even giving outline examples, but I think that anyone advanced enough in writing can find ways to make their writing their own. It sets a good foundation for you to base your writing off of. Also, the book gives a lot of examples, which, at times, I found to be long and over-done. However, the examples proved to be beneficial. Overall, I find the text very useful and I highly recommend it. It's one of those books you buy for a class, but end up keeping for later on; I plan on keeping it as a guide for writing papers.