vi PREFACE FOR INSTRUCTORS
An Overview of the Book The Guide offers everything you need for the writing course.
Part One: Writing Activities
Part One presents nine different genres of writing, all reflecting actual writing assign- ments that students may encounter both in and out of college. While the chapters can be taught in any order, we have organized Part One to move from writing based on personal experience and reflection, through writing based on research and obser- vation, to writing about controversial issues and problems.
Each chapter follows the same organizational plan:
Three brief illustrated scenarios providing examples of how the genre is used in college courses, in the community, and in the workplace
A brief introduction to the genre A collaborative activity helping students start working in the genre An orientation to the genre’s basic features and to questions of purpose and audience specific to the genre A set of readings illustrating the genre accompanied by questions and prompts designed to help students explore connections to their culture and experience and to analyze the basic features and writing strategies
A “Beyond the Traditional Essay” section discussing examples of the genre drawn from unexpected contexts — advertising, blogs, museums, even public parks
A Guide to Writing, tailored to the genre, that helps students refine their own writing processes, with activities for invention and research, easy-reference guides for drafting and revision, a Critical Reading Guide for peer review, strat- egies for integrating sources, and more
Editing and proofreading guidelines, based on our nationwide study of errors in first-year college students’ writing, to help students check for one or two sentence-level problems likely to occur in a given genre
A section exploring how writers think about document design, expanding on one of the scenarios presented at the beginning of the chapter
A look at one student writer at work, focusing on one or more aspects of the writing process of a student whose essay is featured in the chapter
Critical thinking activities designed to help students reflect on what they learned and consider the social dimensions of the genre taught in the chapter