A Student Guide To College Composition Second Edition

This book helps students succeed in composition by showing them: How to be effective students How to handle the most difficult challenges of academic writing How to approach the most common writing assignments. How to pass a timed writing test William Murdick has a Ph. D. in rhetoric and is the author of three other writing textbooks, The Portable Business Writer (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and The Portable Technical Writer (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), and College Writing: A First Course - Writing and Reasoning (Jain, 2006). Note on the Second Edition: This expanded Second Edition includes full-chapter treatments of the five-paragraph theme and the cause-effect essay.

"Fundamentals of College Composition (2nd edition) is a compact, college level writing text that presents the underlying grammatical structures of Standard American English in a format that is understandable without prior formal grammar training. The book's purpose is to improve the clarity and precision of undergraduate writing. College instructors know that far too many undergraduates write poorly. University English departments teach literature, not fundamental writing; university writing departments teach higher level creative-commercial writing, not fundamental writing. Other disciplines must focus on teaching course content, and have precious little time to devote to improving their undergraduate's composition skills"--

This book gives students an answer to the question, “What does my professor want from this essay?” In lively, direct language, it explains the process of creating “a clearly-written argument, based on evidence, about the meaning, power, or structure of a literary work.” Using a single poem by William Carlos Williams as the basis for the process of writing a paper about a piece of literature, it walks students through the processes of reading, brainstorming, researching secondary sources, gathering evidence, and composing and editing the paper. Writing Essays About Literature is designed to strengthen argumentation skills and deepen understanding of the relationships between the reader, the author, the text, and critical interpretations. Its lessons about clarity, precision, and the importance of providing evidence will have wide relevance for student writers.

Composition directors often have little time to prepare new instructors in methods of teaching writing and to forewarn them of the many daily problems that arise in this challenging work. Teaching College Composition, which can be read in a weekend, goes a long way toward meeting those ends. It provides information on twenty-six topics, from issues of class conduct to methods of critiquing papers to ways of evaluating student work. It also provides approaches to six of the most common writing assignments in first-year composition. Teaching College Composition can also serve as a supplemental text for a teaching of writing course, providing an element of "street knowledge" to the theoretical content.