Comprehensive yet flexible coverage. In addition to offering
a rhetoric with readings, research manual, and handbook,
The St. Martin’s Guide supports a range of approaches to teaching and learning, including collaboration, visual rhetoric, personal writing, writing about literature, writing in the community and the workplace, field research, portfolios, oral presentations, essay exams, and ESL. The integrated but flexible format makes the book easy to adapt to any teaching style or situation — help is there when you and your students want it, but unobtrusive when you don’t.
Acclaimed Guides to Writing. The Guides to Writing specific kinds of essays commonly assigned in college — remembering events, writing profiles, explaining a concept, finding common ground, arguing a position, proposing a solution, justifying an evaluation, speculating about causes, and interpreting stories — changed the way writing is taught in American colleges. Based on the best of composition theory, these guides have been continually refined and updated to reflect the classroom experience of the authors and other seasoned instructors. Each Guide emphasizes the basic features of essays in that genre so that students internalize a systematic yet flexible approach to the composing process.
Thorough coverage of argumentation and research. Because so much college writing requires strong argumentation skills, four of the assignment chapters focus on argumentative writing, and a separate strategies chapter covers theses, reasons and support, counterarguments, and logical fallacies. Three full chapters on research give students useful strategies not only for conducting field, library, and Internet research, but also for evaluating sources; deciding whether to quote, paraphrase, or summarize; avoiding plagiarism; and documenting sources.
Superb models and prompts for critical reading and analysis. The Writing Guide chapters in Part One contain 39 compelling readings by well-known authors and fresh voices, including 12 students. Students are offered a variety of ways to engage with the readings, by analyzing writing strategies, relating them to their own experiences, and considering them in the context of larger social issues. In the process, the authors clearly and carefully elucidate the basic features of the genre that students will need to understand when they turn to their own writing.