Writing Your Way Through College

Writing academic essays in college often seems mysterious to students who do not yet understand the process of developing an idea into a finished piece of reasoned prose. Writing Your Way Through College demystifies that process and enables teachers to help students "invent the university" as they reinvent themselves as proficient writers and rhetorical problem solvers. Writing Your Way Through College offers instructors a set of careful lessons that draw on current disciplinary knowledge in composition and rhetoric. Sheryl Fontaine and Cherryl Smith provide a classroom-centered text that guides students through progressively more complex, evidence-based writing. Writing Your Way Through College offers students and teachers: practical lessons on writing and learning a set of assignments that build incrementally a support system for new instructors accessible information about college writing a flexible approach to the classroom. In a concise, readable format, Writing Your Way Through College offers insights into how individuals negotiate language communities so that students can better master the conventions and rhetorical characteristics of academic writing. A creative and effective template for the teaching of writing, Writing Your Way Through College belongs on every shelf and in every classroom.

“Toor’s style is friendly, funny, and genuinely compelling, exhorting students to go deeper with their writing even (and especially) when the stakes are high.” —School Library Journal Writing, for most of us, is bound up with anxiety. It’s even worse when it feels like your whole future—or at least where you’ll spend the next four years in college—is on the line. It’s easy to understand why so many high school seniors put off working on their applications until the last minute or end up with a generic and clichéd essay. The good news? You already have the “secret sauce” for crafting a compelling personal essay: your own experiences and your unique voice. The best essays rarely catalog how students have succeeded or achieved. Good writing shows the reader how you’ve struggled and describes mistakes you’ve made. Excellent essays express what you’re fired up about, illustrate how you think, and illuminate the ways you’ve grown. More than twenty million students apply to college every year; many of them look similar in terms of test scores, grades, courses taken, extracurricular activities. Admissions officers wade through piles of files. As an applicant, you need to think about what will interest an exhausted reader. What can you write that will make her argue to admit you instead of the thousands of other applicants? A good essay will be conversational and rich in vivid details, and it could only be written by one person—you. This book will help you figure out how to find and present the best in yourself. You’ll acquire some useful tools for writing well—and may even have fun—in the process.

An argument that we must read code for more than what it does—we must consider what it means. Computer source code has become part of popular discourse. Code is read not only by programmers but by lawyers, artists, pundits, reporters, political activists, and literary scholars; it is used in political debate, works of art, popular entertainment, and historical accounts. In this book, Mark Marino argues that code means more than merely what it does; we must also consider what it means. We need to learn to read code critically. Marino presents a series of case studies—ranging from the Climategate scandal to a hactivist art project on the US-Mexico border—as lessons in critical code reading. Marino shows how, in the process of its circulation, the meaning of code changes beyond its functional role to include connotations and implications, opening it up to interpretation and inference—and misinterpretation and reappropriation. The Climategate controversy, for example, stemmed from a misreading of a bit of placeholder code as a “smoking gun” that supposedly proved fabrication of climate data. A poetry generator created by Nick Montfort was remixed and reimagined by other poets, and subject to literary interpretation. Each case study begins by presenting a small and self-contained passage of code—by coders as disparate as programming pioneer Grace Hopper and philosopher Friedrich Kittler—and an accessible explanation of its context and functioning. Marino then explores its extra-functional significance, demonstrating a variety of interpretive approaches.

How to craft a dynamic personal essay that will get your college application noticed. College admissions—that is, admission to the school of your choice—has become incredibly competitive. Students and their families prepare from grade school onward to shape school "careers" that will give them a leg up in applying to selective colleges. But sterling academic performance, AP classes, high test scores, and sports and other extracurricular activities are no longer enough to guarantee a slot at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, or the Ivies. In Admit One, Thomas Richards focuses on a key aspect of the college admissions decision, one that makes all the difference in applications: good writing. This involves mastering the dreaded personal essay—but more than that, it means "writing" a college application with a consistent overarching narrative, one that tells a student's intimate story. Writing has the ability to render the grain of a student's own voice, fully integrated and fully under their own control. More than any other element of the application, strong writing is capable of revealing applicants as individuals from the inside out, allowing admissions committees to make fine distinctions between otherwise identical candidates. In plain language, Richards draws together this sense of writing as central to college admissions while showing candidates the secrets of creating an effective, beautifully crafted personal essay. From selecting words to shaping sentences, building paragraphs, and even clarifying a voice, Richards's approach is the key to getting a student's application noticed and read. The resulting essay that readers craft will come as close as possible to being a trustworthy representation of a whole person. Treating the college application as a rigorous intellectual exercise, Admit One contains everything students need to know in order to present themselves with clear-edged precision to an application committee.

This is the comprehensively revised second edition of a popular professional book on textbook writing and finding one's way in the higher education publishing world--for academic authors and editors, college instructors, and instructional designers. The second edition has two new chapters on the latest industry trends--such as the pricing revolt, open access movement, and wiki-textbook phenomenon, and on the use of learning objectives to structure textbook package development. Every chapter features new sections, links, forms, models, or examples from an even greater range of college courses. Contains updated and expanded appendices, glossary entries, references, bibliography entries, and index. BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines/Authorship and Publishing

An interactive, multimedia text that introduces students to reading and writing at the college level.