English Composition: Books & eBooks

Blueprints for Writing: Building Essays demystifies the writing process by guiding you through each step of the essay plan, or blueprint. This text empowers you to write essays from the start, providing numerous practice exercises, activities, and prompts to help you along the way. Blueprints for Writing focuses on the writing process in various modes of development, offering abundant student writing samples throughout, including more than thirty student essays.

Builds confidence by showing students that they already know how to make good rhetorical choices in their daily lives and by offering writing advice for growing those skills as students, professionals, and citizens. By understanding rhetoric, students bridge the gap between the writing that they already do -- online, at home, and in their communities -- and the writing that they will do in college and beyond.

An engaging and fresh take on the rules and politics of English grammar, written in lively prose. It goes a step further than most books on grammar by providing an overview of the field, with a discussion of historical and current debates about grammar, and how we define, discuss, and approach it.

The book provides instructors and students sequences of engaging and exploratory Writing to Learn and Learn by Doing activities and formal, extended writing projects that ask students to interview professors, analyze writing assignments, and reflect on their own reading, writing, and researching processes and histories. These writing projects connect to students' interests, experiences, and goals and provide them with a sense of purpose and audience for writing. The organization of Exploring College Writing moves students from reflection to investigation.

Writing, Redefined gives teachers the power to change what “counts” as writing in schools and classrooms, opening the doorway to students who may not consider themselves to be writers, but should and can. Shawna offers alternative, engaging writing assignments that are visual, aural, and multimodal that will involve all students, specifically the following: who prefer to compose using a wider array of forms and modalities;for whom so-called “standard” English is not the norm;who've been identified as dyslexic;whose cultural traditions lean heavily toward more aural forms of composition; andwho are typically considered “struggling” writers. There is no question that composition in its most common, alphabetic form is important and worthy of frequent study, practice, and play, but broadening our definition of writing opens up an enormous range of possibilities for composing for all students. Even teachers who might feel unprepared to embrace such a new approach will find Shawna's specific suggestions and examples intriguing, perhaps irresistible.