This book is very user friendly for teachers.  The editors have read through various full length articles published in The Quarterly and distilled them into 30 easy to digest suggestions for improving one's teaching of writing.  While some are more inspirational, others are very hands-on, ready-to-use ideas that could easily be adapted to mini-lessons for classroom use.

Ideas that coud easily be turned into Mini-lessons:

Idea #13 -- "Practice and Play with revision and techniques"

This ideas suggest providing students with specific tasks to revisit their writing such as finding a different place that the piece could begin, or finding a place in the piece where a metaphor could be added.

Idea # -- "Make grammar instruction dynamic."

This idea suggest different ways to get students up and moving in order to facilitate learning of grammar.  One mentioned technique is to have students do a "Preposition Walk" around the school to describe what they see using as many prepositions as possible.

Other Suggestions:

WRITING SUMMARIES:

While the pedagogy content is not very high in terms of student interest, it would be interesting to analyze what factors went into the writing of the mini summaries for this book based on the longer original pieces.  How were quotes chosen? How was article content turned in "teaching ideas"