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Rating: 
Summary: Great intro text
Review: Ms. Wood is intelligent and provides a lot of good information in this textbook. This was chosen for the course I teach before I took the position and if I had my way, we would have found a different book. It is not that the information is bad, it is just that Ms. Wood becomes very repetitive. About half of the first six chapters seem to drag on and most of the time restates the same thing from an earlier chapter or from the same chapter. I like what she has done with discussing multicultural issues, but some of it seems to be patronizing to the reader. I think another edition should be done and making the chapters shorter and more readable (Chapter 1 goes on for 78 pages -- which lost my attention, so I know my students had the same problem.) In the course review, the textbook generally gets a poor or below average rating. I can not give you a recommendation, as I am in the middle of searching for a better option.
Rating: 
Summary: Not a reader friendly book.
Review: Ms. Wood is intelligent and provides a lot of good information in this textbook. This was chosen for the course I teach before I took the position and if I had my way, we would have found a different book. It is not that the information is bad, it is just that Ms. Wood becomes very repetitive. About half of the first six chapters seem to drag on and most of the time restates the same thing from an earlier chapter or from the same chapter. I like what she has done with discussing multicultural issues, but some of it seems to be patronizing to the reader. I think another edition should be done and making the chapters shorter and more readable (Chapter 1 goes on for 78 pages -- which lost my attention, so I know my students had the same problem.) In the course review, the textbook generally gets a poor or below average rating. I can not give you a recommendation, as I am in the middle of searching for a better option.
Rating:
Summary: Great intro text
Review: This book is wonderfully accessible and serves as a great introduction to interpersonal communication and preparation for upper-level coursework on relational communication. I have used this textbook for 4 years at a community college and 2 years at a state university and the students have always rated this textbook very highly. Although they do state that the chapters are a bit long, they feel it is very accessbile and easy to understand. The students also report that they like the examples/blurbs from other students that pepper the chapters, and many of them bring up those examples or Wood's personal examples in relation to their own lived experiences during class discussion. Thanks to the students' positive responses to the text, I have been able to explore more options in teaching besides reiterating the text in lecture format and have developed quite an array of exercises and projects that push my students to understand some difficult concepts better, to learn more sophisticated materials, and to improve their interpersonal communication skills through practice. I praise Julia Wood for creating a textbook that allows students to be in charge of their own learning and teachers to go outside the expected routine.
Rating: 
Summary: Valuable, but tedious
Review: This text was required reading for an interpersonal communications course I took. It provided a ton of valuable information, very helpful insight, sample conversations, and examples which helped me to acctually apply what was learned. However, the writing style was highly repetitive, and each new section repeated earlier ones then built on them instead of starting with completely new information. While this did help me learn better, it was also somewhat boring. I would still recommend this book for it's ability to make abstract terms much more tangible. Hope this helps!
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