The Letter Book: Ideas for Teaching College English

The assigning of letters in college classes has generally been limited to helping students learn how to write specific types of them. With "The Letter Book, " Sue Dinitz and Toby Fulwiler offer a better idea, proving what a valuable tool letters are for promoting classroom community, learning of content, understanding of genres, and literacy in general.

Why letters? According to Dinitz and Fulwiler, letter writing is as natural and easy as writing ever gets; everyone knows how to write letters. Just as important, writing letters promotes a dialogical give and take between authors and ideas. And when the teacher or fellow students write letters, other voices can participate in the dialogue.

"The Letter Book" demonstrates a wide variety of ways in which letters can be used in the college classroom, just as the letter exchange itself can take so many different forms. In Chapters 1, 4, and 10, students exchange letters with the teacher. In Chapters 6 and 7, students write to the teacher, who responds to the whole group in a class letter. In Chapters 2, 8, and 9 students exchange letters with each other, and the teacher becomes an observer of rather than a participant in this exchange. In Chapters 3 and 5, the letters become ends in themselves, with students writing them to create their own examples of literary letter genres. To illustrate this wide array of uses, the book includes hundreds of letters written by students and teachers, along with practical advice on how to work letters into your course design and manage the correspondence.