How to Use This Book

For students

Welcome! Whether this book has been assigned to your for class or you’ve discovered it on your own, we hope it is an accessible and enjoyable resources that supports your writing, reading, thinking, and learning. If you are using this book for class, your teacher will likely provide guidelines, but here is some advice to help you just in case.

This book is organized around critical reading and composing skills. Each chapter is written to help you 1) understand and 2) practice particular skills necessary for reading and writing in college. Each section also has an “Application Chapter” that guides you through your writing process to complete a particular kind of composition. At the end of the book, there is a Student Resources section with additional guidance for grammar and style, bibliography and citation, rhetorical terms, etc. This books’ sections are organized as follows:

• Section Introduction
  • Chapter > Skillset 1
    • Understanding
    • Practicing
  • Chapter > Skillset 2
    • Understanding
    • Practicing
  • Chapter > Skillset 3
    • Understanding
    • Practicing
  • Application
    • Understanding the prompt
    • Prewriting
    • Outlining
    • Drafting
    • Reviewing
    • Revising
    • Polishing

This book is motivated by two primary ideas about writing. Remembering these will help you as you move through this resource or your writing course will help you:

• Writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. All writing is an exchange between people, all writing is communication—even when you write to yourself. The “rules” and “standards” that guide our writing were created from practice, from different groups of people wanting to communicate amongst themselves and to other groups of people. This means we do and must constantly think about our relationships to others when we speak, about who they are, about the world we live in together. We communicate through symbols and gestures all the time when we compose text messages and media posts. We write all the time. Many of the ideas in this texts are ideas you already have. Our goal here is to teach you to hone your skills for college and other professional spaces and to give you language to talk about what you already see in the world.
• Writing is hard. It’s hard to put ideas into words. And the more complicated your idea, the richer and more nuanced your thinking, the deeper your feeling, the harder it is. We are all only learning in this class. Learning, and especially learning to write, demands a certain amount of vulnerability. By working from a place of shared vulnerability, you will discover ways to ensure that vulnerability is productive and maintain a certain degree of safety and support through a challenging process.

For instructors