Rise B. Axelrod - The Concise St. Martin’s Guide to Writing

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On the right, the title of the book is mentioned as The St. Martins Guide to Writing Concise along with the edition on top right as EIGHTH EDITION. The names of the authors are mentioned below as RISE B. AXELROD and CHARLES R. COOPER.

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EIGHTH EDITION

The Concise St. Martins Guide to Writing

AXELROD

COOPER

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EIGHTH EDITION

The Concise St. Martins Guide to Writing

Rise B. Axelrod

University of California, Riverside

Charles R. Cooper

University of California, San Diego

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Acknowledgments

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When we first wrote The Concise St. Martins Guide to Writing, our goal was to provide the clear guidance and practical strategies students need to harness their potential as writers, both in college and in the wider world. We also wanted to provide both experienced and novice instructors with the time-tested tools they need to coach their students as they develop skills for writing successfully in college and beyond. These goals have guided our development of the core features of the Concise Guide as well as the many exciting features that keep the eighth edition fresh and useful.

The Concise St. Martins Guide retains its emphasis on active learning by providing practical guides to writing and integrating reading and writing through hands-on activities for critical thinking, reading, analysis, and synthesis.

Each chapter in Part One offers practical, flexible guides that help students draft and revise a variety of analytical and persuasive essays. Honed by experience, the acclaimed writing guides offer surefire invention strategies to get students started, sentence strate-gies to get students writing, and thoughtful peer review and troubleshooting strategies to help students make their writing effective for any rhetorical situation.

Commonsensical and easy to follow, the Guides to Writing teach students how to

• assess the rhetorical situation, focusing on purpose and audience, with special attention to the basic features of each assignment type;
• ask probing analytical questions about what theyre reading, which can help make them more reflective writers;
• practice finding answers through various kinds of research, including memory search, field research, and traditional source-based research.

Each Guide to Writing begins with a Starting Points chart, offering students multiple ways of finding the help they need when they need it. Each also includes a Peer Review Guide to help students assess their own writing and the writing of their classmates and a Troubleshooting Guide to help students find ways to improve their drafts. The charts and guides are organized and color-coded to emphasize the basic features of the particular assignment. In short, the Guides to Writing help students make their writing thoughtful, clear, organized, compellingand effective for the rhetorical situation.

Each chapter in Part One introduces a commonly assigned reason for writing. By working through several assignment types, students learn to identify and use relevant and effective strategies to achieve their purpose with their readers. Remembering an Event, a memoir assignment, challenges students to reflect on the autobiographical and cultural significance of their experience. Explaining a Concept, an analysis assignment, asks students to make a new subject interesting and informative for their readers. A cluster of argument chaptersfrom Arguing a Position and Proposing a Solution to Justifying an Evaluationrequires students to develop an argument that not only is well reasoned and well supported but also responds constructively to readers likely questions and concerns.

Students are asked to read and analyze a range of contemporary selections, attending both to the writers ideas and to the strategies the writer uses to present those ideas to readers. Each Guide to Reading provides

• an annotated student essay that prompts readers to answer questions about how it is composed;
• a pair of compelling professional selections to demonstrate the basic features of writing to achieve a particular purpose;
• activities following each professional selection that prompt students to read actively by asking them to reflect on the essay and relate it to their own experience, and also to read like writers by focusing their attention on the writers strategies. ( also provides an array of strategies students can use to read critically.)

Although the eighth edition of The Concise St. Martins Guide to Writing builds on the success of previous editions, many of the strategies the Concise Guide employs have changed in order to connect more effectively with todays students, who are used to visual rhetoric online and are increasingly challenged by demands on their time, attention, and energy.

A new introductory chapter, Composing Literacy, offers a quick and engaging way to start off a course. Students first learn about the rhetorical situation, a basic literacy concept. They are then invited to read three brief, engaging literacy narratives that demonstrate an array of literacies. Novelist Amy Tan reflects on the differences in the way she uses language with her mother and the way she communicates with academic audiences, science-fiction writer William Gibson remembers the shared cultural experience of watching TV, and cartoonist Lynda Barry looks back on her imaginative interaction with the classifieds. Finally, students are invited to reflect on their own literacy experiences and to compose a literacy narrative.