Writing and Community Action: A Service-Learning Rhetoric and Reader

This book encourages inquiry into community and social action issues, supports community-based research, and shepherds students through a range of service-learning writing projects.

Some chapters offer pragmatic advice for crafting personal, reflective, and analytical essays, while service-learning specific chapters present experience-tested strategies for doing collaborative writing projects at nonprofit agencies, conducting research on pressing social problems, writing proposals that respond to campus and community concerns, and composing oral histories. The assignments help students to see themselves as writers whose work really matters. Readings spark critical reflection on community service and a range of social concerns (including economic justice, literacy, education, homelessness, race, and identity, focusing on invention, audience analysis, and the social purposes of writing. The author encourages students to adopt a rhetorical frame of mind.