Cover: Habits of the Creative Mind, 2nd Edition by Richard E. Miller; Ann Jurecic
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Habits of the Creative Mind

A Guide to Reading, Writing, and ThinkingSecond Edition ©2020 Richard E. Miller; Ann Jurecic

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 de...

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ISBN:9781319103965

Cover: Habits of the Creative Mind, 2nd Edition by Richard E. Miller; Ann Jurecic

Cultivate critical and curious writers

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.

 

Features

  • Twelve empowering habits help writers to develop flexible, engaged writing practices rather than relying on formulaic, task-oriented skills. These habits include unlearning, joining the conversation, asking questions, finding solitude, learning from failure, revising, and more. Students of all skill levels will venture beyond their comfort zones in order to read, think, and write with substance.
  • Proven exercises, called "Practice Sessions," require active participation, creative thinking, and well-considered writing. Students will find themselves drawing, engaging with the natural world for a week, listening closely—and listening again—to an episode of "Radiolab," taking and analyzing notes about when they express curiosity (and when they stay quiet), and more. A complete index of the Practice Sessions, organized by writing activity, is available in Resources for Teaching with Habits of the Creative Mind. 
  • A core set of readings demonstrates how  curious and creative minds work on a problem. Habits also includes numerous recommendations for additional readings that can be found online.

New to This Edition

A new habit of mind and twelve new instructional Essays inspire students to be curious, creative, and critical in their approaches to reading and writing. New habit of mind “Persisting” encourages students to embrace a lifelong practice of determination, and new essays on topics such as “On Question-Driven Writing” and “On Getting Your Act Together” inform while also modeling for students how writing can be used to show a mind at work on a problem.
 
More than a dozen new sequenced assignments span multiple practice sessions helping students to build on their previous activities to work toward a more complex final project. These include an extended project on “the question you want to make sure to have thought seriously about before you graduate from college.”
 
 
An expanded and entirely new Readings section provides students with new readings to serve as both models and a testing-ground for their own ideas. Pieces by Danielle Allen, Rachel Aviv, and Rebecca Solnit can serve as foundations for writing projects about the goal of education in a democracy, the fragility of identity, and the gendering of public spaces. Montaigne’s short essay on “How the Mind Tangles Itself Up” gives students a chance to think about the productive powers of confusion. And Habits explores the creation of the Declaration of Independence, reminding students that even a foundation text is the result of a creative and deliberate writing process.

A new instructor’s manual includes sample syllabi and case studies from a variety of different programs using Habits of the Creative Mind. Created to empower and offer practical suggestions for incorporating Habits into your composition course, this resource also features essays by Richard E. Miller and Ann Jurecic on everything from syllabus design to assessment, along with essays such as “How to use Habits when you’re really not supposed to” by actual instructors who have used Habits successfully in a range of writing classes.
 

"It is a case for being bold as a writing teacher, and for helping your students learn to be bold as writers. It distinguishes itself from other writing textbooks by facing head-on the fact that, because of the way they have been asked to write, so much student writing is unadventurous (and not really worth reading)."

- Brian Zimmerman, Boston College

 

"Habits of the Creative Mind challenges students to free the writer within by breaking down false assumptions the prescribed, high-stakes testing environment of K-12 fosters. Students are encouraged to explore their unique gifts and use new approaches to improve their writing and inspire their thinking."

- Lauren Fortenberry, Georgia Southern University

 

“Habits is the most effective book Ive used for this class--and Ive used many texts trying to find one like this.  I wish you could have been at final presentations this week. Students talked about Habits over and over.  Im smiling.”

 - Sara Harrell, Indiana University – Purdue University, Indianapolis

Digital Options

Table of Contents


Preface
1. Orienting
On Finding Your Feet 
On Habits
On Thinking New Thoughts 

2. Beginning
On Unlearning
On Letting Go of Writing-by-Formula 
On Confronting the Unknown

3. Paying Attention
On Learning to See
On Looking and Looking Again
On Paying Attention to Words 

4. Questioning
On Asking Questions
On Writing to a Question
On Question-Driven Writing 

5. Exploring
On Going down the Rabbit Hole
On Creative Reading
On Choosing Your Own Adventure

6. Connecting
On the Three Most Important Words in the English Language
On Joining the Conversation 
On Working with the Words of Others

7. Working Deliberately 
On Seeing as a Writer
On Reading as a Writer 
On Reading in Slow Motion

8. Reflecting
On the Miracle of Language
On Making Thought Visible
On the Examined Life 

9. Persisting
On Encountering Difficulty 
On Learning from Failure  
On Thinking Unthinkable Thoughts

10. Organizing 
On Structure
On Revising
On Getting Your Act Together 

11. Speculating
On Argument as Journey
On Imagining Alternatives  
On Complexity 

12. Playing
On Laughter 
On Bending Conventions 
On the Joys of Pseudonymous Writing 

Readings
Thomas Jefferson, et al., The Declaration of Independence
Michel de Montaigne, How Our Mind Tangles Itself Up
Danielle Allen, What Is Education For?
Rachel Aviv, The Edge of Identity
Rebecca Solnit, Occupied Territory 

Works Cited

Index

Headshot of Richard E. Miller

Richard E. Miller

Richard E. Miller is a Professor of English at Rutgers University where he has been teaching since 1993. Richard has written a number of scholarly books, the most recent being, On the End of Privacy (2019). He has tried his hand at blogging, poetry, graphic narrative, and photography, and is currently working on a book of creative nonfiction entitled, To Become a Writer. In 2022, Richard received the Chancellor-Provosts Award for Excellence in Teaching which honors a member of the New Brunswick faculty "whose teaching contributions resulted in an extraordinary impact on the institution, students’ experiences, and public engagement."

Headshot of Ann Jurecic

Ann Jurecic

Ann Jurecic is an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University where she teaches the history of the essay, women writers, and the medical humanities. Ann taught in a public high school, a community college, and the Princeton Writing Program before she joined the Department of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 2005. Ann’s first book, Illness as Narrative (2012), charts the emergence of personal writing about illness in the twentieth century. Her new book, Changing Minds: Women and the Political Essay, 1960–2000, is about the careers of five innovative writers, among them Rachel Carson and Joan Didion (2023).

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