Textbook Authorship

Advice on Textbook Writing

Well, here's a new series of posts with tips and advice on textbook writing. Some of the topics, such as the following, are ones I forgot to mention in my books, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook and Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements. Other topics simply will address my pet peeves, such as poor writing habits and, more importantly, the poor habits of mind that compromise textbook organization and content.

In my years of work with textbook manuscripts, I have noticed a pervasive voice-audience pattern that I think reduces the value and effectiveness of textbooks overall. To wit: Authors write as if they alone are teaching the course. Authors also often write as if students have no other information source or recourse for discovering or mastering course content.

That the textbook author tends to assume a godlike role and status should come as no surprise. After all, writing is an act of creation, traditionally performed in private and without interference for some imaginary audience that is both passive and captive. This kind of discourse replicates the lecture model of traditional classroom instruction. Add to this the well-known academic ego and it is easy to see how the authorial voice may become authoritative to a fault. The problem is that authors do not see themselves as adjuncts to flesh-and-blood teachers or their textbooks as instruments in another scholar-educator's work.

As a result, the instructor who adopted the textbook for use in his or her class may be ill considered or cut out of the process. The textbook says every possible thing that can be said about each topic, space permitting, leaving nothing to the imagination and little for the instructor to add! Even the instructor's manual that comes with the textbook has little of interest for the flesh-and-blood teacher to do other than assign the readings and show the videos the publisher provides as part of the package.

The instructors who adopt your textbook are an important part of your audience, not just the student readers. So, if you were collaborating with them to teach a course, one off-site (you, the author) and others on-site (the flesh-and-blood classroom instructors), how might your textbook writing and supplements change? This is interesting to think about. What could you do to help your colleagues in the trenches take the primary role in student course outcomes, teach well, and look good?

The same logic applies to the other part of the audience, the students. How can you help them take the primary or active role in their learning, learn well, and look good? In the 80+ textbooks I have reviewed, I came across only two that systematically asked students questions, required students to frame questions, or modeled any kind of inquiry process. But learning is as much an act of creation as teaching or writing. And students must rely neither on you nor on your classroom counterpart as "the" knowledge-giver.

Sharing power over the reader's mind does not come easily to academic authors, but there is so much information today that your textbook cannot stand apart as some kind of bible for the course for which you wrote it. In the last 10 years filling textbook chapter closers with URLs has become obligatory, but often Internet links are strewn gratuitously, with no clear direction for using outside information in constructing knowledge or skills. Consider, too, the rapid growth of collaborative online teaching, e-learning, and custom or wiki textbooks. Where and how will your textbook--as one source of knowledge and as one voice--take its place in this new world?

Labels: audience, authorial voice, textbook writing, writing and developing your college textbook

posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 10:26 AM