In The Centrality of Style, editors Mike Duncan and Star Medzerian Vanguri argue that style is a central concern of composition studies even as they demonstrate that some of the most compelling work in the area has emerged from the margins of the field. Calling attention to this paradox in his foreword to the collection, Paul Butler observes, "Many of the chapters work within the liminal space in which style serves as both a centralizing and decentralizing force in rhetoric and composition. Clearly, the authors and editors have made an invaluable contribution in their collection by exposing the paradoxical nature of a canon that continues to play a vital role in our disciplinary history."

Here you’ll find extensive support for APA, MLA, and Chicago documentation styles. This section features instructional videos that show you how to set up your papers in APA, MLA, and Chicago formats, interactive checklists, and visual support for both in-text documenting and referencing at the end of your paper. If you’re new to documentation or just need a refresher, the Citations & Documentation area can help.

This is volume 2 of a a two-part instructional text series for first-year composition students. Volume 2 is intended for students who have some college composition and rhetoric knowledge and experience.

This work is the course material for a lower division college Composition course.

This textbook is meant for first year English Composition Courses. The text covers the essentials of composition and rhetoric in a recursive manner and introduces research skills.

When you are eager to get started on the coursework in your major that will prepare you for your career, getting excited about an introductory college writing course can be difficult. However, regardless of your field of study, honing your writing skills—and your reading and critical-thinking skills—gives you a more solid academic foundation.

In college, academic expectations change from what you may have experienced in high school. The quantity of work you are expected to do is increased. When instructors expect you to read pages upon pages or study hours and hours for one particular course, managing your work load can be challenging.

The quality of the work you do also changes. It is not enough to understand course material and summarize it on an exam. You will also be expected to seriously engage with new ideas by reflecting on them, analyzing them, critiquing them, making connections, drawing conclusions, or finding new ways of thinking about a given subject. Educationally, you are moving into deeper waters. A good introductory writing course will help you swim.

Composition 1: Introduction to Academic Writing was created with the intention of providing a free, comprehensive Composition 1 textbook to the students of Connors State College in Oklahoma. This textbook is a compilation of several OER textbooks and resources with edits, revisions, and additions provided by Brittany Seay. This composition 1 textbook covers academic writing in its most basic definition.

Chapter 1 covers what is academic writing, who does it, and why
Chapter 2 covers the rhetorical modes used in academic writing
Chapter 3 covers rhetorical analysis
Chapter 4 covers the basic parts of a standard academic essay
Chapter 5 covers the academic argument
The last section of the book is a collection of 88 open essays

This work is the course material for a lower division college Composition course.

This book reimagines the college essay by exploring how the process develops across a number of modalities and subjectivities.

The editors of Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom bring together stories, theories, and research that can further inform the ways in which we situate and address intellectual property issues in our writing classrooms. The essays in the collection identify and describe a wide range of pedagogical strategies, consider theories, present research, explore approaches, and offer both cautionary tales and local and contextual successes that can further inform the ways in which we situate and address intellectual property issues in our teaching.

Most literature students are introduced to literary theory and writing about literature as separate subjects, though the two are intimately linked in the practice of literary scholarship. Literary scholarship is guided by literary theories and expressed through writing; it doesn’t make sense to learn each in isolation. Literary theories are intellectual models that scholars use to understand stories, novels, poems, plays, and other texts. Different theories prioritize different historical, social, or methodological concerns. The authors believe students of literature should learn about many literary theories so they can discover which interpretive tools work best for them when they write about literature in their classes (and beyond). This book aims to help students build up a personal toolbox of interpretive possibilities.

This is a collection of writing exercises, mostly (but not solely) aimed at high school and college classroom work. It is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to copy and share its contents so long as you do so for noncommercial reasons and provide attribution.

Critical Expressivism is an ambitious attempt to re-appropriate intellectual territory that has more often been charted by its detractors than by its proponents. Indeed, as Peter Elbow observes in his contribution to this volume, "As far as I can tell, the term 'expressivist' was coined and used only by people who wanted a word for people they disapproved of and wanted to discredit." The editors and contributors to this collection invite readers to join them in a new conversation, one informed by "a belief that the term expressivism continues to have a vitally important function in our field."

a freely available textbook to learn language power techniques, such as metaphor, doublespeak, pronoun choice, and name-calling, and associated grammar, such as basic sentence structure, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners. The book is for use in language arts, grammar, rhetoric, and English instruction at the high school, community college, and university levels, as well as by private individuals and groups.

A Handbook to Understanding College Composition, SP22 edition. Curated and/or composed by the English Faculty at Howard Community College.

Using a combination of the newest findings in hemispheric science, neuropsychology, and brain development, along with the long-established rhetorical algorithms for analyzing the structure of arguments, this course explores the boundaries of critical and creative thinking in pursuit of developing a clearer and more robust model for the construction and deconstruction of various forms of argument. A variety of "texts" are used to help students develop rhetorical analysis skills, critical thinking tools and a diverse, integrative apparatus for establishing the veracity of truth claims in both academic and cultural contexts.

Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing addresses the complexities of developing professional and technical writing programs. The essays in the collection offer reflections on efforts to bridge two cultures — what the editors characterize as the "art and science of writing" — often by addressing explicitly the tensions between them. Design Discourse offers insights into the high-stakes decisions made by program designers as they seek to "function at the intersection of the practical and the abstract, the human and the technical."

For undergraduates following any course of study, it is essential to develop the ability to write effectively. Yet the processes by which students become more capable and ready to meet the challenges of writing for employers, the wider public, and their own purposes remain largely invisible. Developing Writers in Higher Education shows how learning to write for various purposes in multiple disciplines leads college students to new levels of competence.

This volume draws on an in-depth study of the writing and experiences of 169 University of Michigan undergraduates, using statistical analysis of 322 surveys, qualitative analysis of 131 interviews, use of corpus linguistics on 94 electronic portfolios and 2,406 pieces of student writing, and case studies of individual students to trace the multiple paths taken by student writers. Topics include student writers’ interaction with feedback; perceptions of genre; the role of disciplinary writing; generality and certainty in student writing; students’ concepts of voice and style; students’ understanding of multimodal and digital writing; high school’s influence on college writers; and writing development after college. The digital edition offers samples of student writing, electronic portfolios produced by student writers, transcripts of interviews with students, and explanations of some of the analysis conducted by the contributors.

This is an important book for researchers and graduate students in multiple fields. Those in writing studies get an overview of other longitudinal studies as well as key questions currently circulating. For linguists, it demonstrates how corpus linguistics can inform writing studies. Scholars in higher education will gain a new perspective on college student development. The book also adds to current understandings of sociocultural theories of literacy and offers prospective teachers insights into how students learn to write. Finally, for high school teachers, this volume will answer questions about college writing.

Anne Ruggles Gere is Director of the Sweetland Center for Writing, Professor of English, and Professor of Education at the University of Michigan.

This text is intended for students and instructors of Academic Advanced Writing for English Language Learners. Support for this Open Educational Resource was provided as a portion of a sabbatical project by Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland, USA.

Editing is a foundational skill for taking your writing to the next level. The editing process ensures that the key ideas that you present in your writing can be understood clearly by your reader, allowing your message to have a higher impact. This workshop outlines a process that takes you through editing content and organization, through to editing grammar and smaller details in your paper. It also includes information that will support you in the editing process if you are writing in a language that is not your mother tongue.