Unique sequenced coverage leaves no gaps Touchstones’ incremental instruction, carefully sequenced activities, and innovative design build students’ confidence and ability, guiding basic writers to master the essentials of academic writing and grammar.
- Carefully stepped-out coverage shows students how to generate ideas, and then how to organize them into flawless outlines. Juzwiak’s research shows that two of the most difficult tasks for basic writers are generating and organizing ideas. To help them meet these challenges, Touchstones offers a full chapter on developing ideas and two full chapters on organizing and outlining, helping students master the vital steps between brainstorming and drafting.
- Color-coding keeps all students on track. Touchstones’ clean and innovative design color-codes the parts of speech so that all students can easily identify their function throughout and identify common errors. In the writing chapters, color and visuals are used to identify main ideas, support, and other key concepts.
Hundreds of creative exercises — in the book and online — light the intellectual spark in students and offer abundant skill practice; quizzes on the companion Web site include a gradebook that lets instructors track student progress.
Unique self-assessment features work for students. Innovative "Challenge Meter" allows students to chart their own progress on grammar activities, from "warm-up" at the beginning of the chapter to "mastery test" at the end. Pre-tests (What Do You Know?) and reviews (Bringing It All Together) in each chapter allow students to self-assess, gauging their level of mastery and identifying areas that need work.
Flexible organization lets instructors teach the class their students need.
- Fundamental writing practices such as brainstorming, drafting, and revising paragraphs and essays are covered in Part One.
- Higher-level writing skills such as using precise language, paraphrasing, summarizing, and using research in college writing are covered in Part Two.
- "Build It / Fix It" grammar coverage in Part Three — a grammar and style toolbox —works visually and textually to imprint basic writers with essential sentence patterns. Then, it guides them through the steps of building these sentence types and recognizing and correcting their common problems.
- Engaging, thematically organized readings in Part Four help students connect reading and writing skills and are introduced by a full chapter on reading for college.
Bedford media adds value to your course. Choose just what you and your students need: free and open content — including supplemental exercises and activities available online or as Coursepacks for your course management system — or innovative premium media like WritingClass and SkillsClass, online course spaces preloaded with exercises, diagnostics, video tutorials, writing and commenting tools, and more. To learn more, visit yourwritingclass.com or yourskillsclass.com.