Writing Intensive: Books

The present volume is the result of a pilot study and a workshop at Queensborough Community College that tried to integrate and discussed poetry as a new method of writing intensive pedagogy across the curriculum. Educators from several different disciplines - Art and Design, Biology, English, History, Philosophy, and Sociology - describe such methods and their teaching experiences in the classroom and highlight, how poetry has been and could be used for fruitful teaching and learning across the curriculum. The interdisciplinary pilot study and the discussions at the workshop, which are represented by the chapters in the present volume consequently emphasize the possibilities for the use of poetry at Community Colleges and U.S. undergraduate education in general. Contributors are: Kathleen Alves, Alison Cimino, Urszula Golebiewska, Joshua M. Hall, Angela Hooks, Frank Jacob, Shannon Kincaid, Susan Lago, Alice Rosenblitt-Lacey, Ravid Rovner, and Amy Traver.

In this volume, Mark Waldo argues that writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs should be housed in writing centers and explains an innovative approach to enhancing their effectiveness: focus WAC on the writing agendas of the disciplines. He asserts that WAC operation should reflect an academy characterized by multiple language communities--each with contextualized values, purposes, and forms for writing, and no single community's values superior to another's.

Written for those who design, redesign, and assess writing programs, Very Like a Whale is an intensive discussion of writing program assessment issues. Taking its title from Hamlet, the book explores the multifaceted forces that shape writing programs and the central role these programs can and should play in defining college education.

In one of the few book-length studies of a major post-secondary writing-across-the-curriculum initiative from concept to implementation, Writing-Intensive traces the process of preparation for new writing requirements across the undergraduate curriculum at Simon Fraser University, a mid-sized Canadian research university. As faculty members across campus were selected to pilot writing-intensive courses, and as administrators and committees adjusted the process toward full implementation, planners grounded their pedagogy in genre theory--a new approach for many non-composition faculty. So doing, the initiative aimed to establish a coherent yet rhetorically flexible framework through which students might improve their writing in all disciplines. Wendy Strachan documents this campus cultural transformation, exploring successes and impasses with equal interest. The study identifies factors to be considered to avoid isolating the teaching of writing in writing-intensive courses; to engender a university-wide culture that naturalizes writing as a vital part of learning across all disciplines; and to keep the teaching of writing organic and reflected upon in a scholarly manner across campus. A valuable case history for scholars in writing studies, WAC/WID, and curricular change studies.

This volume offers the first comprehensive guide to how high-impact practices (HIPs) are being implemented in online environments and how they can be adjusted to meet the needs of online learners. This multi-disciplinary approach will assist faculty and administrators to effectively implement HIPs in distance education courses and online programs. With a chapter devoted to each of the eleven HIPs, this collection offers guidance that takes into account the differences between e-learners and traditional on-campus students.

This writer's reference condenses and covers everything a beginning writing student needs to successfully compose college-level work, including the basics of composition, grammar, and research. It is broken down into easy-to-tackle sections, while not overloading students with more information than they need.

Writing in College is designed for students who have largely mastered high-school level conventions of formal academic writing and are now moving beyond the five-paragraph essay to more advanced engagement with text. It is well suited to composition courses or first-year seminars, and valuable as a supplemental or recommended text in other writing-intensive classes. It provides a friendly, down-to-earth introduction to professors' goals and expectations, demystifying the norms of the academy and how they shape college writing assignments. Each of the nine chapters could be read separately, and each includes suggested exercises to bring the main messages to life.Students will find in Writing in College a warm invitation to join the academic community as novice scholars and to approach writing as a meaningful medium of communication.

Writing for Success is a text that provides instruction in steps, builds writing, reading, and critical thinking, and combines comprehensive grammar review with an introduction to paragraph writing and composition.

This peer reviewed textbook, published by the University of North Georgia Press, combines a composition rhetoric manual with grammar and documentation instruction and resources, components that can be flexibly arranged to fit instructors' classroom plans. It includes standard rhetoric instruction, information and practice for Standard English Grammar, and guidelines for the four most common documentation styles. Its reader compiles essays written for English 1101, focused for thematic discussion and selected for use in rhetorical analysis. The textbook also includes a glossary of pertinent terms and ancillary instructor resources.

Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction. Inspired by the provocative science- and social-science-focused book This Idea Must Die and written for a general audience, the collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of and antidotes to major myths in writing instruction.