Helps students apply common sense rhetorical questions. Easy-to-understand guidelines direct students to make effective choices as they write. Students learn the questions they need to ask to understand any writing situation in terms of the writer, reader, text, and medium. "Thinking Rhetorically" icons highlight this advice throughout the book.
Provides essential help for writing in the disciplines. Examples draw from writing across the curriculum. Chapter 7, "Writing in the Disciplines: Making Choices as You Write," helps students analyze writing tasks in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and business.
Offers practical advice on analyzing texts and constructing effective arguments. Chapter 4 guides students toward the strong analytic skills that are central to academic writing; Chapter 5 guides students to design carefully reasoned academic arguments.
Pays careful attention to writing as design. Today's students need to effectively employ all the resources available to them: words, images, design elements, and media. Chapter 1 compares writing and design, providing a bridge that helps students develop the confidence and rhetorical sensitivity they need to succeed as academic writers.
Presents a wide range of model student essays. The multi-part case study in Chapter 5 and eleven other samples of student writing throughout the book, many of them annotated, serve both to instruct students and to inspire them.