The Mad Scientist S Guide To Composition Mla 2021 Update

Considering the composition classroom as a mad scientist’s laboratory, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition introduces different kinds of writing as experiments. Writing an essay is a task that can strike fear into a student’s heart, but performing an experiment licenses creativity and doesn’t presume that one knows the outcome from the start. The Mad Scientist’s Guide covers the kinds of writing most often required on college campuses, while also addressing important steps and activities frequently overlooked in composition guides, such as revision and peer reviewing. Actual examples of student writing are included throughout, as are helpful reminders and tips to help students polish their skills. Above all, the Mad Scientist’s Guide seeks to make writing fun.

Monsters are scary, but academic writing doesn't have to be!

Co-authored by a novelist and a scholar, Speaking of Writing follows four college students from diverse backgrounds as they face the challenges of reading, writing, and critical thinking in first-year composition classes and across the disciplines. Each chapter engages students in relatable, often humorous scenarios that focus on key challenges. Through its story-based approach, this brief rhetoric enacts process-based pedagogy, showing student writers grappling with fundamental questions: How can I apply my own strategies for success to new assignments? How can I maintain my own voice when asked to compose in an academic style? What do college professors mean by a thesis? Why is my argument weak, and how can I make it stronger? The book vividly dramatizes a draft-and-revision process that includes instructor feedback, peer review, and careful research.

This first-year composition rhetoric-reader uses a Writing about Writing (WAW) approach and a conversational style to help students engage in threshold concepts and transfer what they know about writing to new situations. Each chapter asks a key question such as “Why Write?” or “What Is the Rhetorical Situation and Why Should I Care about It?” Preliminary answers to the chapter question are provided in accessible prose, and these initial ideas are supplemented with a selection of three or four readings and a list of recommended online texts. Prompts for informal and formal writing projects keep the focus on writing and help students apply writing studies scholarship to their own lives in meaningful ways. A companion website includes recommended WAW resources, assignment supports, and links to additional readings: sites.broadviewpress.com/focusonwriting

Wherever we look today, popular culture greets us with “texts” that make implicit arguments; this book helps students to think and write critically about these texts. The World Is a Text teaches critical reading, writing, and argument in the context of pop-culture and visual examples, showing students how to “read” everyday objects and visual texts with basic semiotics. The book shows how texts of all kinds, from a painting to a university building to a pair of sneakers, make complex arguments through their use of signs and symbols, and shows students how to make these arguments in their own essays. This new edition is rich with images, real-world examples, writing and discussion prompts, and examples of academic and student writing. The first part of the book is a rhetoric covering argumentation, research, the writing process, and adapting from high-school to college writing, while the second part explores writing about specific cultural topics. Notes, instruction, and advice about research are woven into the text, with research instruction closely tied to the topic being discussed. New to the updated compact edition are chapters on fashion, sports, and nature and the environment.

This is a book for real students, people with full and active lives. Academic Writing Now: A Brief Guide for Busy Students covers the basics of the introductory college writing course in a concise, student-friendly format. Each chapter concentrates on a crucial element of composing an academic essay and is capable of being read in a single sitting. The book also includes numerous “timesaver tips,” along with warnings about frequent student errors—all designed to help students make the most of one of their most limited and precious resources: time.

How does one help undergraduate students learn quickly how to produce effectively organized, persuasive, well-reasoned essays? This book offers a straightforward, systematic introduction to some of the key elements of the construction of arguments in essay form. The focus here is on practical advice that will prove immediately useful to students—recommended procedures are emphasized, and detailed examples of academic and student writing are provided throughout. The book introduces the basics of argumentation before moving on to the structure and organization of essays. Planning and outlining the essay, writing strong thesis statements, organizing coherent paragraphs, and writing effective introductions and conclusions are among the subjects discussed. A separate section concisely explores issues specific to essays about literary works.

In recent decades, the contested areas of English usage have grown both larger and more numerous. English speakers argue about whether we should say man or humanity, fisher or fisherman; whether we ought to speak of people as being disabled, or challenged, or differently abled; whether it is acceptable to say that’s so gay. More generally, we ask, can we use language in ways that avoid giving expression to prejudices embedded within it? Can the words we use help us point a way towards a better world? Can we ask such questions with appropriate seriousness while remaining open-minded—and while retaining our sense of humor? To all these questions this concise and user-friendly guide answers yes, while offering clear-headed discussions of many of the key issues.