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The Writer's Presence ed. by Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. St. Martin's: Boston, 1994. 676 pp.
Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan have put together a collection of essays which epitomize the very elements we, as writers or as teachers, understand to be the building blocks of "good writing." They have organized the works in The Writer's Presence to show some of the ways a writer may be present in his or her writing. "It shows how a wide variety of talented writers establish a distinct presence in many different kinds of writing and for many different purposes and audiences" (2). The Writer's Presence contains many examples a teacher might use to show how personal experience, voice, point of view and patterns might be used by a writer to establish presence in a piece of writing.
The first section of the book, "Establishing an Identity," contains essays by writers from many different cultural and social backgrounds. A sampling of...