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Miller, Richard E.

Miller, Richard E.

Habits of the Creative Mind, 3rd Edition

Inspire creativity and curiosity with Habits of the Creative Mind

Habits of the Creative Mind is not your typical textbook. With a focus on exploration, curiosity, and creativity in thinking and writing, this book will help you develop the habits you need to become a better writer. If you want to be more thoughtful, reflective and mindful as a writer, this is the book for you.

Habits of the Creative Mind, 2nd Edition

A unique resource for first-year composition, Habits of the Creative Mind encourages college writers to be curious and follow their own paths in order to discover their own interests. Portable and flexibly arranged, the second edition of this innovative text offers frameworks to develop persistence in planning, revising, and learning from failure, with all new examples of writers at work on interesting problems as models for reflection. With input from instructors who use Habits, a new instructor’s manual provides practical suggestions for incorporating this approach to exploring questions and facing complexity.

Habits of the Creative Mind

 
Habits of the Creative Mind is a bracingly fresh guide to writing: it is tough minded and feisty in discussing writing; it offers an exciting sense of the uses of modern technology to the writing student; and it is energetically interested in "creative" writing--not fiction or poetry, but writing about the real world with insight and clarity. Miller and Jurecic write with passionate energy about many issues that confront the young writer trying to imagine how to respond to other texts and new ideas, trying to find where to start, trying to move past summary into questioning, arguing, saying something. They don't care about the five-paragraph essay that too many young writers have been taught in public schools. They care about turning writers first into thinkers; and then moving from tough thinking into discovering how much they have to say. That is: they care about the curiosity that is fundamental to good writing. When they talk about "writing's magical powers," they show how "creative" is their thinking. Even the three readings they have chosen witness the ambition of this book: Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Fear of a Black President," Jill Lepore's "The Last Amazon: Wonder Woman Returns," and Susan Sontag's "Looking at War." In summary: a bracing challenge to conventional approaches to teaching writing.

Writing at the End of the World

In this book, Professor Richard E. Miller addresses a set of provocative and timely questions about the humanities and the literate arts. What do the humanities have to offer in the twenty-first century? Are there compelling reasons to go on teaching the literate arts when the schools themselves have become battlefields? Does it make sense to go on writing when the world itself is overrun with books that no one reads? In these simultaneously personal and erudite reflections on the future of higher education, Professor Miller moves from the headline to the classroom, focusing in on how teachers and students alike confront the existential challenge of making life meaningful. In meditating on the violent events that now dominate our daily lives school shootings, suicide bombings, terrorist attacks, contemporary warfare he prompts a reconsideration of the role that institutions of higher education play in shaping our daily experiences, and asks us to reimagine the humanities as centrally important to the maintenance of a compassionate, secular society. By concentrating on those moments when individuals and institutions meet and violence results, Professor Miller's Writing at the End of the World provides the framework that students and teachers require to engage in the work of building a better future.

As if Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education

Although the culture wars have preoccupied the nation for the past two decades, these impassioned debates about the function of education have produced few lasting institutional changes. Writing with wit and precision, Professor Richard E. Miller shows why the system of higher education has been particularly resistant to reform. Unraveling stereotypes about conservative, liberal, and radical reform efforts, Miller looks at what has actually happened when theories about education have been put into practice.