A book I want
Some time back, I stumbled by accident on Gerald Graff's book Clueless in Academe and found that it explained really well why some of my students were crashing and burning on their essays. Basically, the kids know how to research and write, but the whole process of structuring an academic argument is alien to them.

Now I see that Graff and his wife Cathy Birkenstein have written a guide to rhetoric for students called They Say/I Say. I wish I had a lot of money; I'd hand out copies of it when I give back my current crop of essays. Better yet, I wish I'd been teaching from it before the essays came in.