How To Be A Better Writer: READ

There are two well-known ways to become a better writer:

READ.

WRITE.

There are two well-known ways to be successful in college:

READ from a wide range of challenging books.

WRITE about what you read.

The more you read, the better a writer you will become. As you are exposed to language and ways to use it, you can incorporate these tools into your own bag of tricks as a student and as a writer.

To this end, I am adding more reading to the English 2 class I adopted two weeks ago.

Students will be able to choose from the following books to form a “Book Club” to discuss the texts and in writing groups for the subsequent analysis and argument assignment.

The first five books on the list are by local authors–

How To Be Chicana Role Model by Michele Serros
growing up in Oxnard; in several local libraries

Sespe Wild by Brad Monsma
natural and human history of the Sespe area behind Fillmore, Santa Paula and Ojai; also in local libraries

Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
business and life philosophy by the Patagonia founder
easy to find at Patagonia’s headquarters on Santa Clara and Olive; local libraries

Middle of the Night Poems From Daughter to Mother :: Mother to Son by Gwendolyn Alley
narrative poems tracing the journey from daughter to mother from the perspective of 3:15am August nights; you can buy this from me, online (print or e edition from publisher en theos press),
at Bank of Books, Bart’s, Best of VC Marketplace in Santa Paula

Like a Splinter In Your Mind by Matt Lawrence
the philosophy behind the Matrix movies; available on library reserve at VC

The final two book selections are from non-local authors. The first is the one being read as part of a “One Book One Campus” initiative:

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Widely available including in the VC bookstore

while the second is:

Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg

Students will be able to choose which book they want to read as long as there are three people in the class who will read it with them and be in their book club.

While you will be able to find these books online, I encourage you to support local bookstores like Bart’s in Ojai, VC Marketplace, Patagonia and especially