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.

Although the text is designed to look like an actual book, the Table of Contents is composed of hyperlinks that will take you to each introductory section and then to each text. The three parts of the text are organized into the following units:

Part 4—The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Unit I: The Age of Reason

Unit II: The Near East and Asia

Part 5—The Long Nineteenth Century

Unit I Romanticism

Unit II Realism

Part 6—The Twentieth Century and Contemporary Literature

Unit I Modernism

Unit II Postcolonial Literature

Unit III Contemporary Literature

Texts from a variety of genres and cultures are included in each unit. Additionally, each selection or collection includes a brief introduction about the author and text(s), and each includes 3 – 5 discussion questions. Texts in the public domain--those published or translated before 1923--are replicated here. Texts published or translated after 1923 are not yet available in the public domain. In those cases, we have provided a link to a stable site that includes the text. Thus, in Part 6, most of the texts are accessible in the form of links to outside sites. In every case, we have attempted to connect to the most stable links available.

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

Composition 2: Research and Writing was created with the intention of providing a free, comprehensive Composition 2 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 textbook focuses on the ins and outs of academic writing and research. It looks at the early stages of research from generating ideas and key term searches to creating projects that synthesize the information found from sources. This textbook also discusses academic writing with a particular focus on research writing.

Chapter 1 covers the idea behind research and why it is important
Chapter 2 covers finding and reading academic sources
Chapter 3 covers using the information found in academic sources
Chapter 4 covers putting together an academic research argument

This book is divided into two parts. Part I is a Composition Handbook designed to teach students the components of the writing process and the conventions of various forms of school and college writing assignments. Part II is an Anthology of Literature designed to help students read actively, analyze, understand, enjoy, and appreciate stories, poems, and plays by a diverse and inclusive group of exceptional writers.

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.

This is a collection of cumulative units of study for conventional errors common in student writing. It's flexible, functional, and zeroes in problems typically seen in writing of all types, from the eternal "there/they're/their" struggle to correct colon use. Units are organized from most simple to most challenging.

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.

This Open Educational Resource (OER) web-book aims to empower English teachers from across the globe to design their own, authentic, corpus-based lessons by showcasing a range of ideas for creating corpus-informed teaching materials using online resources.

Pre-service trainee teachers from Osnabrück University (Germany) contributed the chapters as part of three English Pedagogy Masters of Education seminars taught by Elen Le Foll.

The introductory chapter “About the project” outlines the rationale and development of the project and discusses how various challenges were overcome. The remaining Lesson Ideas chapters are organised according to the school type for which they were developed.

Part I is dedicated to corpus-informed lesson ideas for primary schools.
Part II showcases corpus-informed lesson ideas for secondary schools.
Part III explores the use of corpora in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and bilingual secondary education.
Part IV presents corpus-informed lesson ideas for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and vocational education.

For teachers and teacher trainees entirely new to corpora, we recommend selecting one or two chapters of interest and following the step-by-step instructions in order to recreate the corpus-informed materials proposed by the chapter authors. As you work your way through these, you will find that the various ideas and methods outlined in all the chapters can easily be transferred to an infinite range of different language foci, topics, and educational contexts.

In addition, most of the chapters include worksheets that can be downloaded as individual PDFs in just one click. Thus, this book also provides a low-threshold introduction to working with corpus-informed materials for teachers with no previous knowledge of corpora. It is hoped that the experience of using these “oven-ready” corpus-informed materials, which require little to no preparation time, will encourage teachers to subsequently invest time in working through a selection of the book’s chapters in order to, in due course, be able to pick their own ingredients and create entirely new and delicious corpus-informed dishes!

Each chapter, or recipe, has a different focus which may be lexical, grammatical, or phraseological, and focuses on a different set of language and/or interdisciplinary skills. The chapters are all similarly structured. The chapter contributors begin by describing their lesson’s learning objectives and outlining the rationale for their choice of topic, corpus, and corpus tool. They then guide the reader through all the necessary steps to create their proposed corpus-informed materials with clear, tutorial-like and illustrated step-by-step instructions. In many instances, the authors also provide instructions for their lesson tasks, as well as (possible) solutions. At the end of each chapter, you will also find additional options and ideas to expand or adapt the proposed lesson to the taste buds of your students.

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.