about the author -
key features -
description -
companion site -
catalog page -
home - |
The Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers:
Full Edition with Handbook (1998 MLA Update Edition)
Fourth Edition
by Stephen Reid
| 
 |
 |
As we move to the new millennium, we are witnessing a dramatic change in the contexts for the teaching of writing. the recent explosion of world wide web sites, the increasing ease of access to the Internet, and the expanding number of computer classrooms and terminals available to student writers have revolutionized the teaching and practice of writing. On the Internet, writers can quickly access an incredible range of information, both about specific subjects and about the process of writing and revising. On local networks, students can continue conversations started in print media or in the classroom, get and receive peer advice about drafting and revision, and access teacher response. Distance learning becomes a practical reality, as students sitting at computers in different cities or countries can communicate as easily as students sitting at adjoining computers.
The more things change, however, the more they remain the same. Writers still need to learn critical reading skills. They still need to assess rhetorical contexts, establish rhetorical purpose, consider their audiences and readers, develop and organize their ideas, and learn how to revise and edit their writing to meet the rhetorical situation. They still need to learn to work cooperatively and collaboratively to create a writing community. Computers and networks are merely electronic means for communicating--for putting people in contact with people, writers in contact with readers. Computers and networks can continue teachers' efforts to communicate with their students and to center their curriculum on the students' reading, writing, and revising.
In its fourth edition, The Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers retains an emphasis on aims and purposes for reading and writing, on a clear sequence of chapters that move from expressive to argumentative writing, and on extensive, integrated writing process advice that helps students learn to read, write, and revise. Providing ongoing support for both students and teachers during the reading, writing, and revising processes remains the overriding goal of this text.
Continued in the fourth edition is an emphasis on critical reading and responding to texts. Chapter Five, "Reading," uses the summary/response essay as a means to teach active and critical reading, accurate summarizing, and focused responding to texts. Drawing on reader-response theories and psycho-linguistic research, Chapter Five provides a variety of activities to promote active reading and critical responding.
New to the fourth edition is a focus on using and evaluating sources from the Internet and the World Wide Web. First, five new essays, scattered throughout the text, give students information about the Internet--what it is, how to use it, and how it affects writing and learning. Second, an expanded section on locating, evaluating, and documenting Internet and Web sources help students use electronic resources in their writing. Finally, the fourth edition contains over fifteen new professional essays by writers such as John Muir, Horace Miner, Mike Rose, Elayne Rapping, Neil Postman, Edward Koch, and Mike Royko. The additional essays help create thematic clusters of topics that reappear throughout the text: Race and Cultural Diversity, Gender Roles, Technology and the Internet, Environmental Issues, Education, Literacy and Language, Advertising and the Media, and Dependency and Dysfunction. See the Thematic Contents (following the table of contents) for a complete listing. Finally, The Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers continues to showcase student writing, featuring the work of more than forty student writers from several colleges and universities. The fourth edition contains twenty-three full-length student essays and ten essays with sample prewriting materials and drafts.
Key Features
Continuing in the fourth edition of The Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers is a wide range of noteworthy features:
Logical Sequence of Purpose-Based Chapters
Aims and purposes, not rhetorical strategies, guide each writing assignment. Early chapters focus on invention strategies (observing, remembering, reading, and investigation), while later chapters emphasize exposition and argumentation (explaining, evaluating, problem solving, and arguing).
Focus on Writing Processes Every major chapter contains techniques, professional and student samples, journal exercises, reading and writing activities, collaborative activities, peer-response guidelines, and revision suggestions designed to assist students with their work-in-progress.
Journal Writing Throughout the text, write-to-learn activities help writers improve their critical reading skills, "warm up" for each assignment, and practice a variety of invention and shaping strategies.
Marginal Quotations Nearly a hundred short quotations by composition teachers, researchers, essayists, novelists, and poets personalize for the inexperienced writer a larger community of writers still struggling with the same problems that each student faces.
Annotated Instructor's Edition (AIE) In the margins of the Annotated Instructor's Edition are hundreds of teaching tips and suggestions for assignments and group activities. (0-13-621863-6)
Designed to accompany the Annotated Instructor's Edition, Teaching Composition with the Prentice Hall Guide contains sections on composition theory, policy statements, lesson plans, collaborative writing, writing in a computer classroom, small-group learning, write-to-learn exercises, reading/writing exercises, prereading journal assignments, writing assignments, suggestions for student conferences, and responding to and evaluating writing, as well as an annotated bibliography of articles about teaching writing. Also included are chapter commentaries and answers to discussion questions. (0-13-645458-5)
Available for a nominal fee, the Critical Thinking Skills Journal provides students with additional exercises and freewriting activities, as well as opportunities to consider and respond to opposing viewpoints. (0-13-645532-8)
An Introduction to Myths and Rituals for Writing Chapter One, "Writing Myths and Rituals," discounts some common myths about college writing courses, introduces the notion of writing rituals, and outlines the variety of journal writing used throughout the text. Rituals are crucial for all writers but especially so for novice writers. Effective rituals are simply those behavioral strategies that complement the cognitive and social strategies of the writing process. Illustrating a variety of possible writing rituals are quotations from a dozen professional writers on the nature of writing. These short quotations continue throughout the book, reminding students that writing is not some magical process, but rather a madness that has a method to it, a love that is built from labor, and a learning that is born of reading, thinking, observing, remembering, discussing, and writing.
An Orientation to Rhetorical Situation and to Writing Processes Chapter Two, "Purposes and Processes for Writing," bases the writing process in the rhetorical situation (writer, subject, purpose, text, and audience). It restores the writer's intent or purpose (rather than a thesis sentence or a rhetorical strategy) as the driving force during the writing process. It demonstrates how meaning evolves from a variety of recursive, multidimensional, and hierarchical activities that we call the writing process. Finally, it reassures students that, because individual writing and learning styles differ, they will be encouraged to discover and articulate their own processes from a range of appropriate possibilities.
Aims and Purposes for Writing The text then turns to specific purposes and assignments for writing. Chapters Three through Six ("Observing," "Remembering," "Reading," and "Investigating") focus on invention strategies. These chapters illustrate how writing to learn is a natural part of learning to write. To promote reading, writing, discussing, revising, and learning, these chapters introduce four sources of invention--observing people, places, events, and objects; remembering people, places, and events; reading and responding to texts; and investigating information through interviews, surveys, and written sources. Although students write essays intended for a variety of audiences in each of these chapters, the emphasis is on invention strategies and on writer-based purposes for writing. Although this text includes expressive and transactional elements in every assignment, the direction of the overall sequence of assignments is from the more personal forms of discourse to the more public forms.
Chapters Seven through Ten ("Explaining," "Evaluating," "Problem Solving," and "Arguing") emphasize subject- and audience-based purposes. The sequence in these chapters moves the student smoothly from exposition to argumentation (acknowledging the obvious overlapping), building on the skills and sociocognitive strategies of the previous chapters. The teacher may, in fact, use Chapters Seven through Ten as a minicourse in argument, teaching students how to develop and argue claims of fact, claims of cause and effect, claims about values, and claims about solutions or policies.
Responding to Literature Chapter Eleven guides students through the process of writing interpretive essays about short fiction, using many of the critical reading strategies, invention techniques, and shaping strategies practiced in the earlier chapters. This chapter contains three short fiction works and two student essays.
Research Paper Chapter Twelve ("Writing a Research Paper") draws on all the cognitive and social strategies presented in the first eleven chapters. Research papers are written for specific purposes and audiences, too, but the invention, composing, and revising processes are more extended. This chapter helps students select and plan their projects, use the library, find Internet sources, evaluate and document electronic and print sources, record their progress, and test ideas in research logs--learning all the while to integrate the information they gather with their own experiences and ideas.
Handbook A brief handbook includes a review of basic sentence elements, sentence structure and grammar, diction and style, and punctuation and mechanics.
back to book page |
|
