I read this book not as an instructor seeking a job or tenure or promotion, but as a writing centre administrator recently finished three years editing a journal. I was surprised at the depth of the essays, for I had expected a how-to” book but, in addition, found significant commentary.

The first of the three sections of the book provides advice on how to publish articles, and the advice is from an impressive list of editors and former editors: Richard C. Gebhardt (CCC), Joseph Harris (CCC), Theresa Enos (Rhetoric Review), and Christina Murphy (Composition Studies).

 Joseph Harris has the most surprising and intriguing chapter: he argues against the personal in scholarly articles. More specifically, Harris suggests that our opposition to the pressure to produce more rigorous research articles and the widespread acceptance of feminism have led us to grant too much to the autobiographical in our writing. He grounds his analysis by examining a feminist criticism that Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital should have included Braverman’s personal experience as a skilled artisan. Harris argues that what Braverman calls his “’sense . . . of moral outrage’” comes through in more subtle ways, and that autobiography, far from being the sine qua non of good writing, was a rhetorical move Braverman did not have to use to be effective.

Harris then uses some of Jane Tompkins’ writing to make the point that the supposedly personal and unique often paints a stereotype, and that the points arising from autobiographical elements are often quite predictable.  While Tompkins says that she does not want to separate working as a critic from expressing her feelings, Harris says that when he goes to the dentist he merely wants the dentist to do a good job, and when he reads an article about composition, he wants to rethink his work, not look into the emotional life of the author. As a solution, Harris turns to Clifford Geertz’ distinction between confessional and situated forms of writing—situated being an attempt “to describe the work I’ve been doing with myself in the picture.” Although I’m still wondering how the distinction holds up in practice, I found Harris’s politically incorrect chapter an interesting surprise when I expected the book to tell me how to be politically correct in order to get published.

In the second section of the book, Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe draw on their personal experience as editors to lend weight to their chapter about how to publish an edited collection. Besides regular books, book-length projects receiving chapters are dissertations-to-monographs, rhetoric textbooks, and essay collections for first-year students.

The final section of Olson and Taylor’s book departs from the how-to emphasis and tackles a variety of issues: Thomas Kent argues that theory is largely useless for controlling writing practice, James J. Murphy gives advice on historical studies, Todd Taylor looks at electronic scholarship, Linda Flower explains her observation-based theory building, and Janice M. Lauer argues that we should not push rhet/comp graduate students to publish.

The chapter of most general interest focuses on psychologist Robert Boice’s series of studies on helping academics overcome writer’s block and become more productive. Early studies revealed the most effective method to be a strong series of rewards and punishments, which the professors refused to maintain when the lengthy experiments were completed. Boice then developed a combination of four methods that proved to be more effective and long lasting than any of the single methods regularly recommended. Professors wrote an hour a day,  (1) beginning with 10 minutes of free writing on their topic,  (2) practising handling such things as unfair negative criticism,  (3) noticing and stopping negative thoughts and replacing them with more rational and positive thoughts, and (4) providing rewards and punishments based on the volume of work produced. Boice combines this work with his study of new professors who publish prolifically, and he presents five guidelines for improved productivity, beginning with “Wait actively.”

Even though I was not in the target audience for this book, I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it as a reference.