First Encounters with Pride and Prejudice in the Composition Classroom

This article makes a case for using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a tool for skill-based writing instruction in the composition classroom. The novel employs prose strategies such as commonplaces and amplification that become springboards for class conversation about prose style and student writing. Additionally, the novel’s characters admit to difficulties with composition, such as language usage and organization in letter writing, that seem eerily familiar to those voiced by novice writers in a freshman writing course. Mangiavellano contends that students eagerly seek out ways the novel reminds them of their own lives, and he argues that Pride and Prejudice in the composition classroom can reflect back to students versions of their academic selves just as much as it does their personal selves.