Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers

For Tom Romano, the multigenre paper is much more than a writing assignment. It is a multilayered, multivoiced literary experience. Genres of narrative thinking require writers to make an imaginative leap, melding the factual with the imaginative. Writers can't just tell. They must show. They must make their topics palpable. They must penetrate experience. Multigenre papers enable their authors to do that.

Blending Genre, Altering Style is the first book to address the practicalities of helping students compose multigenre papers. Romano discusses genres, subgenres, writing strategies, and stylistic maneuvers that students can use in their own multigenre papers. Each idea is supported with actual student writing, including five full-length multigenre papers that demonstrate the possibilities of a multigenre approach to writing. There are also discussions of writing poetry, fiction, and dialogue, in which readers will discover how students can create genres out of indelible moments, crucial processes, and important matters in the lives of the subject under inquiry. One chapter alone is devoted to helping writers create unity and coherence in their papers.

Imbued with Romano's passion for teaching, Blending Genre, Altering Style is an invaluable reference for any inservice or preservice English language arts teacher. The only prerequisite is a desire to help students write.

Tom Romano is the author of several bestselling books with Heinemann, including Clearing the Way (1987); Writing with Passion (1995); Blending Genre, Altering Style (2000); and Crafting Authentic Voice (2004). His latest is Zigzag (2008), a memoir of his teaching and learning lives. Tom has taught high school and college students for more than thirty years, and he currently teaches writing and language arts methods in the department of teacher education at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio . In summer he often teaches in the New Hampshire Literacy Institutes at the University of New Hampshire .