Excerpts

Strategies for College Writing, second edition, emphasizes the interconnectedness of reading and writing by teaching students to read with a writer's eye and to write with a reader's expectations. The book employs a set of innovative and coordinated activities that enable students to understand their roles as readers and to connect their reading experiences to their own writing. The numerous readings, pedagogical features, and writing topics give instructors the freedom to select from a broad range of assignments and approaches. A Writer's Approach to Analytical Reading. The opening chapter, "Engaged Reading," presents an effective and easy-to-use procedure for reading nonfiction from a writer's perspective. The chapter applies the familiar journalists' questions-- Who? What? Why? How? --to the process of reading and analyzing essays. This approach shows students how to evaluate their roles as readers and how to respond to the rhetorical contexts of their reading assignments. To illustrate the procedure, the chapter contains a professional essay, along with the responses of a student using the Who, What, Why, and How questions to analyze that essay. A Concise Survey of the Writing Process. Chapter 2, "Writing from Reading," offers practical guidance on the primary tasks of the writing process: discovering, organizing, drafting, revising, and editing. This chapter also explains how students can connect their reading experiences to their own writing. A sample student essay--based on the Who, What, Why, and How analysis from Chapter 1--illustrates these connections. A Contextual Study of Rhetorical Strategies. Chapters 3 through 11 explain and illustrate the strategies that students use to organize and develop their college writing assignments: narration, description, exemplification, process analysis, definition, division and classification, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, and argument. The discussions of the individual strategies include these important pedagogical features: A chapter introduction presents each major rhetorical strategy in the context of a sample professional selection and a student essay written in response to that selection. The accompanying analysis points out how the student's thinking and writing have been influenced by the reading. These introductions provide advice on how to get started, how to organize and develop content, how to open and close the essay, and how to use the professional model. Brief Writer's Workshop activities, which can be done collaboratively, help students review the key rhetorical points for the two essays in the introduction. A Checklist for Reading and Writing at the end of each introduction sums up the major issues for understanding and applying each strategy. A detailed Writing from Reading Assignment follows the second professional selection in each chapter. Students are given step-by-step directions for designing an essay written in response to the professional selection. Additional professional readings provide further examples of each major strategy. Interactive, Integrated Apparatus. The connection between reading and writing is stressed in the apparatus that accompanies each of the professional selections: The prereading apparatus consists of a "preparing to read" question (which can be used as a journal prompt) and an introductory headnote. The postreading apparatus follows the Who, What, Why, and How approach established in the opening chapter. It includes "First Responses" (which could also be used for journal writing) and questions that explore voice and tone ( Who ), content and meaning ( What ), purpose ( Why ), and style and structure ( How ). Several Ideas for Writing direct students to try their hand at writing a short essay using the ideas and strategies they have examined in the professional selection. Each chapter ends with Further Ideas for Using the strategy. These topics include suggestions for collaborative writing and for combining strategies. Internet activities, part of the postreading apparatus, include suggestions for using the resources of the Internet to answer questions about the professional essays and to gather ideas and information for writing essays. A brief article on Internet use, "Twelve Tips to Search the Internet Successfully," appears at the end of Chapter 2. This extensive apparatus gives teachers and students a wide variety of choices for exploring the reading-writing connection. Varied, Thought-Provoking Readings. The sixty-six professional selections have been chosen to illustrate the major rhetorical strategies used in nonfiction writing. They include essays and excerpts of various lengths and cover a wide range of styles and viewpoints. Each chapter begins with two relatively brief readings and then offers longer, more demanding selections for analysis and writing. The topics and issues are intended to engage students and stimulate their thinking. A special effort has been made to appeal to a cross section of readers by including a number of essays by women and multicultural writers. There is a mix of standard works and new selections. The ten student essays are an important component of the book's pedagogy. They were written by college freshmen and sophomores employing the reading-writing approach that this book teaches. These essays demonstrate how student writers are able to use the ideas and strategies they encounter in professional readings by applying and adapting them to their own writing. Other Features. For instructors who want to correlate reading assignments or organize their course around issue-centered units, the Thematic Table of Contents groups the readings according to several common themes. Each group includes a .pair of essays that can be studied together for the way they complement or challenge each other with their individual takes on a specific theme. The text also contains a glossary of useful rhetorical terms. WHAT'S NEW IN THE SECOND EDITION New Readings. Twenty-six new readings--more than a third of the selections--address a variety of current topics, from the ordinary (French fries, shopping) to the controversial (immigration, the Internet). Many of these new essays include proven favorites by Langston Hughes, Gary Soto, Joan Didion, Alice Walker, Diane Ackerman, Amy Tan, Lewis Thomas, John Holt, Stephanie Ericsson, Scott Russell Sanders, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Bharati Mukherjee, whereas others introduce newer pieces by Malcolm Gladwell, William Finnegan, Phyllis Rose, Stephen King, Amy Wu, Steve Silberman, Claudia Dreifus, Ian Frazier, and Thad Williamson. Four of the ten student essays are also new to this edition. Three Pro-Con Debates on New Topics in the Argument Chapter. To meet the changing interests and concerns of both students and instructors, the chapter on argument now includes three debates: on the pros and cons of young people on the Internet, on daytime TV talk shows, and on the death penalty. Appendix on Using and Documenting Sources. The appendix offers concise but complete guidance on the use of secondary sources: using and incorporating quotations, avoiding plagiarism, and citing and documenting sources (including electronic sources) in the latest MLA style. The appendix also includes a sample documented student essay that uses nonfiction sources, the kind of research paper that undergraduates are frequently asked to write. Two Thematic Clusters in Chapter 12. This chapter presents a cluster of three essays on two provocative topics of current interest: immigration and sports. Increased Instruction on Revision and Attention to Audience. Chapter 2 (on the writing process) contains expanded coverage of the revising and editing stages, including suggestions for getting peer feedback and working in writing groups. The focus on audience has been augmented throughout the book. Additional Suggestions for Using Computers and the Internet. There are a number of new ideas for using the Internet to benefit both reading and writing, and advice on using the word processor is now included in Chapter 2. Excerpted from Strategies for College Writing: A Rhetorical Reader by Robert Funk, Linda S. Coleman, Susan X. Day All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.