The focus of instruction is on helping students to write, not on mastering the content of a textbook. What makes writing difficult, as Francis Christensen has pointed out, is that writers have to do everything at once. In such situations the general advice of most textbooks is not much help. In general, students will learn faster and more effectively if they avoid trying to apply general rules in new situations and, instead, work through the implications of each new writing situation as problems arise, thereby arriving at their own conclusions inductively. This is not to say that the advice of textbooks is to be totally ignored or that generalizations about writing cannot be helpful, only that you should always try to help students apply such advice in each new rhetorical situation.
Students practice writing a wide range of discourse for a wide variety of purposes and audiences.
The form of any particular piece of writing is almost exclusively determined by the context in which it is written. Personal essays are not organized in the same way as office reports. Newspaper editorials do not have the same tone as literary analyses. The only way students can learn the multitude of conventions that shape writing is by trying to write in a variety of situations that call the range of these conventions into play. I and II are divided into four units, each devoted to one major aim of writing as set forth by James Kinneavy in A Theory of Discourse.