As a freshman nutrition major, this book was required for my English 101 class. I found it to be boring, unhelpful, and plodding. The author's instructions for activities leave you depressed and annoyed, and teachers have to jump around a lot to instruct properly.

This might be a good reference book, and perhaps even a book for secondary/high schools, but not for a college English class.

I also teach "post-secondary English" but I have found the St. Martin's Guide to Writing to be a very useful resource because it gives students (and me) much support for the writing process, interesting readings for writing models and discussion, and, given the current high cost of college textbooks, its comprehensiveness means I don't have to require students to purchase more than one book! St. Martin's includes a writing handbook to review foundational writing skills. Chapters on taking tests and building a portfolio are also helpful, but what I like best about this book is its careful attention to supporting how we write with step-by-step explanations and examples. This care to detail is very useful for my students who are entirely online!

I consider this book to be one of the best how-to-write books I've read. I'm not a college student, but a writer who wants to sharpen skills, and I have found many sections of the book to be extremely helpful--the section on writing profiles, for example, and the one on writing autobiographical essays, just to name two. I've also found the information contained in other sections--such as Narrating, Illustrating, Comparing and Contrasting, Field Research--to be invaluable. I'm so glad I came across this book! I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a detailed plan for learning to be an excellent writer.

As a college writing instructor, I've used several texts for freshman composition, including this one. While Axelrod and Cooper cover the bases from pre-writing through revision and include a variety of interesting essays for analysis, this is just another composition text. Visually, it is unexciting, and the impact of technology on writing today is not addressed as it should be. Also overlooked are the needs of international students and students for whom English is a second language. Bottom line: it's easy to find other texts that are better than this one.

Cooper's tome tackles an important issue !!!
-- is there a god? -- is god merely absent or has s/he
'died' in some way? -- how are we to make life meaningful?

but Cooper lets his theater-training creep out in one unforgettable chapter, during which the naive reader is drawn into a tangential web of inferences inspired by dramaturgical zealotry. The dude -- Dr. Cooper of East Stroudsburg (PA) University -- tests the patience of his readers with an almost merciless string of references to plays by Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, even Sophocles. and all the while, as you might've guessed, Ole Doc Cooper stridently rails against the Death of God theologians of the sixties! doesn't he even give 'em a chance? Nope. Guilty until proven innocent, for those poor scholars-of-the-abyss.
If you're a-searchin' for an unbiased examination of the ideas surrounding THE last interesting movement in modern theology -- that of 'Christian Atheism' -- then you're in for a boatload of disppointment if you decide to purchase and then read Doc Cooper's terrible tome.