First and foremost, I want to acknowledge one major goal of this text: to center the student learning experience among a community of learners. Most of the exemplar texts included here are actual student work that I\u2019ve encountered over my career as a teacher. Almost always, the texts in anthologies are exclusively by professional writers. While this sets a high standard, many of my students tend to think that polished, publishable, and impactful writing is not theirs to create. Instead, this text showcases outstanding student work as evidence that you, and other student authors like you, are very capable of producing beautiful, moving, thorough, thoughtful, and well-informed rhetoric.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, the use of student writing relates to this book\u2019s focus on writing as process, not product. We\u2019ll discuss this further in the General Introduction, but I want to give you fair warning that the student essays included here would not meet some readers\u2019 standards of \u201cperfect.\u201d They exemplify some techniques very well, but may fall short in other domains. These student authors, just like professional authors, realize that a piece of writing is never actually finished; there are always ways to challenge, reimagine, or polish a text. As you read model texts, whether they are written by students or professional authors, you should ask yourself, What does this author do well, and what could they do better? In what ways are they fulfilling the imperatives of the rhetorical situation, and what advice would I give them to improve? To support this critical perspective<\/a>, each text included in the main sections of the book is followed by a \u201cTeacher Takeaway\u201d: ideas from college professors reacting to the work at hand. While these takeaways are not comprehensive, they offer a starting point for you to interpret the strengths of a model text.<\/p>\n