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Mosaics: Focusing on Sentences
in Context
First Edition
by Kim Flachmann, Jane Maher,
Elizabeth H. Campbell, Nancy Johnson,
and D. B. Magee
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Students everywhere must learn to respond to the varying intellectual demands made on them throughout the college curriculum so that they have the best possible chance of succeeding in higher education. One extremely important part of this process is being able to analyze ideas and think critically about issues in many different subject areas. Mosaics: Focusing on Sentences in Context is the first in a series of three books that teaches the basic skills so necessary to all good academic writing. By focusing on eight primary purposes for writing in each book, this series illustrates how the companion skills of reading and writing are parts of a larger process that moves back and forth through the tasks of prereading/reading, prewriting/writing and revising/editing. In other words, the Mosaics series shows how these tasks are integrated at every stage of the writing process.
Assumptions
This text is based on the following fundamental assumptions:
1. Thinking, reading, and writing are intricately related.
2. Students learn best from discovery and experimentation rather than from instruction and abstract discussion.
3. Students must be able to transfer their writing skills to all their college courses.
4. Students profit immeasurably from studying models of both professional and student writing.
5. Students perform better in college when they learn to think critically and analytically.
6. Students learn both individually and collaboratively.
How This Book Works
This book begins with a general introduction to the writing process (Chapter 1) outlining the scope and sequence of the volume. The eight chapters that follow are each divided into three carefully integrated sections:
Reading and Writing for a Reason
Tips for Revising
Tips for Editing
Reading and Writing for a Reason
Each chapter focuses on one of the eight primary purposes for writing: recalling, observing, explaining, investigating, restating, analyzing, persuading, and problem solving. The purpose is explained and then featured in a professional essay and a student essay before the readers are asked to compose an essay of their own.
Learning from Published Writers focuses on a provocative professional essay with a controlled reading level in order to introduce students to a specific purpose for writing. Each essay was chosen for its high interest and moderate readability level and serves as a springboard in form and content for the rest of the chapter.
Learning from Your Peers walks students through the writing process using an actual student essay. Your students witness the development of a student essay that moves through the general recursive tasks of thinking, planning, developing, organizing, drafting, revising, and editing. The revised draft is printed in each chapter with the student changes highlighted.
Writing Your Own Essay asks students to compose their own essays focusing on the purpose they have just studied. Following a brief review of the highlights of the chapter and the composing process, students are given four writing topics to choose from. After they draft, revise, and edit their essays, students are then asked some specific questions that require them to pause and reflect on their own composing process before they start another chapter.
Tips for Revising and Tips for Editing
The second and third sections of each chapter, Tips for Revising and Tips for Editing, can be taught by themselves or in conjunction with the first section. The revising sections focus on effective sentences in the context of essays; they progress from fairly simple to more complex revision strategies. The editing sections then serve as brief but thorough reference guides to grammar and usage; they move from the most basic usage and syntactic problems to more sophisticated writing conventions. The strategies in these sections are integrated into the first part of each chapter. In addition, the Tips for Revising and Tips for Editing include instruction and focused exercises (on both the sentence and paragraph levels) that are drawn from the professional and student essays featured in the chapter. Each Tips section begins with a checklist summarizing the tasks to be covered and ends with collaborative work for individual, small group, or entire class projects.
The specific skills taught in the three main sections of this first book in the
Mosaics series are listed here so that you can see in abbreviated form how this particular book works.
Unique Features
Several unique and exciting features separate this book from other basic writing texts:
1. It moves students systematically from personal to academic writing.
2. It gives student writing the same attention as professional writing.
3. It illustrates all aspects of the writing process.
4. It integrates reading and writing throughout the text.
5. It teaches revising and editing through the student essays in each chapter.
6. It features culturally diverse reading selections that are of high interest to students.
The Mosaics Series
All three books in the Mosaics series (Focusing on Sentences in Context, Focusing on Paragraphs in Context, and Focusing on Essays) introduce the writing process as a unified whole and ask students to begin writing full essays in the very first chapter. The Tips for Revising sections, however, change the emphasis of each book: The first book highlights sentence structure, the second book paragraph development, and the third the composition of essays. The books also differ in the length and level of their reading selections, the complexity of their writing assignments, the degree of difficulty of their revising and editing strategies, and the length and level of their student writing samples. Each volume moves from personal to more academic writing in various disciplines throughout the curriculum.
The books are fully integrated in two significant ways: (1) The revising and editing strategies for each chapter are integrated into the demonstration of the writing process in the first part of each chapter, and, in turn, (2) the Tips for Revising and Tips for Editing draw examples and exercises from the professional and student essays in the first section of each chapter. This constant cross-reference and repetition of ideas and skills in different contexts throughout each chapter will help students grasp the basic procedures and potential power of the entire writing process.
Ultimately, each book in the Mosaics series portrays writing as a way of thinking and processing information. One by one, these books encourage students to discover how the "mosaics" of their own writing process work together to form a coherent whole. By demonstrating the interrelationship among thinking, reading, and writing on progressively more difficult levels, these books promise to help prepare your students for success in college throughout the curriculum
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