Writing at the Threshold: Featuring 56 Ways to Prepare High School and College Students to Think and Write at the College Level

Writing at the Threshold offers both an eloquent philosophy of composition instruction and an immediately useful set of classroom-tested teaching ideas distilled from the author’s 28 years of teaching writing. Two aims underlie all others: (1) tapping every student’s inborn ability to think extensively and well and (2) helping every student develop the skills he or she will need in order to communicate good thinking. Weinstein moves easily from brief, lively reflections on inquiry-based learning to highly engaging strategies for translating theory into practice in the classroom. In closing, he offers a set of five course sequences, each proposing a markedly different way to shape a whole writing course using methods discussed in the book. As a bonus, the author frequently refers to additional materials on his companion website, where teachers can “point and click” for resources to use or adapt in the classroom.