Professor Williams encourages teachers of writing to acknowledge the huge background of TV expertise that our students bring to freshman composition classes. Rather than seeing TV saturation as a disadvantage, Williams contends that the critical thinking skills and other rhetorical strategies our students have developed while watching TV can in fact have positive implications for their writing.

He examines the history of anti-television attitudes, exposing a long-established academic distrust of popular culture that has led to the view of education, especially the teaching of writing and critical thinking, as a remedy against cheap and easy entertainment. Even if we see TV as a negative influence, however, Williams believes we cannot teach our students to write well without addressing TV in our classes. We make a mistake when we ignore TV, he argues, because it is such an enormous part of most students' lives. We should rather incorporate it, consider its benefits, and compare and contrast its methods and audience responses with those used and evoked by print texts.

Rather than asking our students to separate their "real" lives from their academic lives in the classroom, Williams feels we can create a community based on our shared TV experiences and draw on these to teach the value of reading and writing. He sees clear parallels between students' effortless development as skillful TV viewers and their more difficult development as skillful readers and writers.

Throughout the text, drawing upon interviews conducted with fifteen student volunteers from first year composition courses -- a remarkably small but seemingly representative sample -- and his experience in the writing classroom, Williams constructs an argument for understanding our TV-saturated students, perspectives and using this understanding to illuminate similarities and differences between TV "texts" and print texts. He develops and explains parallels in the two forms of discourse. Given the facts that writing teachers usually prefer print and students usually prefer TV, a natural division of interest seems inevitable, but Williams counsels compromise. If we take the time to find the connections between reading/writing skills and those arising from TV-watching, he maintains, we are more likely to convince students that print literacy is more valuable. We must also, he says, admit that TV does some things better than print (providing immediacy of communication) and some things very well (developing a narrative, evoking emotional responses, showing resolution, demonstrating the impact of repetition, and delivering all these in an easily ingested manner).

Some of Williams' observations seem self-evident -- he notes, for example, that a student's level of engagement may change from one viewing time to another -- and some seem debatable (he believes that students are rarely passive viewers) but he is convincing in his belief that a rich vein of untapped potential exists in directing students to compare their TV with their print experiences. The skills and strategies students learn from watching TV, he maintains repeatedly, "can be used productively to advance the print literacy goals of a college writing class." These skills include the ability to identify form/genre, to apply critical judgment, and to piece together narrative meaning from a series of quickly changing images.

Throughout the book, Williams gives his TV-watching students a generous amount of credit. He challenges the notion that they are completely passive and isolated, seeing them instead as "participatory and interactive," and no more isolated than readers. He maintains that they create a "collage of meaning" from surfing rapidly through various channels with a remote control. Ironically, he writes, students who can make meaning from unconnected TV images are often stymied by a print text that takes a non-linear narrative form.

Williams builds his case methodically. His book is straightforward, clearly written, and fairly persuasive, though often repetitive. Each chapter concludes with a useful section of "Classroom Practice" that provides suggestions for applying theory to writing instruction. Williams proposes specific exercises that allow teachers to build on the expertise our students have with TV news, dramas, sitcoms, and sports broadcasts. He demonstrates, for example, the way he used TV coverage of one unfolding event (the 2002 presidential election) to illustrate description, narrative development, authorial presence, analysis, irony, reliability of sources, argument, the importance of audience, and often-overlooked assumptions about class and consumerism.

Williams' final chapter looks at the future of composition and foresees the necessity to broaden our concept of literacy. He accepts as inevitable the combination of print and visual text, and he advocates continued exploration of ways in which TV and other media overlap and complement traditional rhetoric. Williams believes writing teachers have an obligation to show students how to reflect on and analyze ideas coming from all media, not just the traditional print texts.

Professor Williams' goals in this book are to inform writing teachers of the ways that TV is already influencing our students and to help us benefit from the "critical discursive abilities" formed from watching TV that teachers usually dismiss or ignore. Watching TV is NOT just like reading and writing, but Williams argues persuasively that higher education will benefit if teachers abandon the stereotype of mindless viewing and link the critical TV skills students already possess to the strategies they need to develop in order to interpret and produce high-quality print texts.

Eileen Crowe,
UNC Asheville