Fields of Reading Motives for Writing

Fields of Reading draws on the major divisions of the curriculum — arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences — to offer well-crafted and high-quality writing from these fields. Chosen with the rhetorical purposes of composition in mind by editors who are all distinguished teachers and writers, the selections progress from individual essays to paired texts to casebooks that contain multiple readings on engaging topics and compelling issues. Even more than its predecessors, the new edition emphasizes the cross-curricular reading, thinking, and writing expected in college as it exposes students to key cultural conversations that involve major voices in contemporary intellectual life. The print text is now integrated with e-Pages for Fields of Reading, designed to take advantage of what the Web can do. 

Nancy R. Comely is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Queens College, City University of New York.  In addition to Fields of Reading, she has coedited The Practice of Writing and Text Book for Bedford/St. Martin's, and is coauthor with Robert Scholes of Hemingway's Genders (Yale UP). She has also directed the writing program at the University of Oklahoma. Carl H. Klaus, Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa and founding director of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, currently serves as coeditor (with Patricia Hampl) of Sightline Books: the University of Iowa Press Series in Literary Nonfiction. He is coauthor or coeditor of several college textbooks, most recently Fields of Reading, Ninth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010), and Stages of Drama (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003). Essayist, diarist, and memoirist, Klaus is the author of My Vegetable Love: A Journal of a Growing Season (Houghton Mifflin); Weathering Winter: A Gardener’s Daybook (University Of Iowa Press); and Letters to Kate: Life after Life (University of Iowa Press). Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches writing and mentors new writing teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  She led Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year writing program and establishing Harvard’s WAC program. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers and Responding to Student Writing are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition.  Her recent work involves a longitudinal study of college writing to understand the role writing plays in undergraduate education. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and is coauthor of Fields of Reading, Ninth Edition (2010). Jason Tougaw is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Queens College. He is author of Strange Cases: The Medical Case History and the British Novel (Routledge, 2006) and coeditor, with Nancy K. Miller, of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (University of Illinois Press). Currently, his writing focuses on connections between neurobiology and the arts, new media pedagogies, and creative nonfiction. He has published essays and creative nonfiction in JAC, Computers & Composition, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, and the anthology Boys to Men: Gay Men Write about Growing Up.

Robert Scholes, professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, is a distinguished teacher and a scholar in literary studies. He has published many influential books and articles, including The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline (1998), Protocols of Reading (1989), and Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985), which won the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize of the Modern Language Association in 1986 and the David H. Russell Research Award from NCTE in 1988. Scholes is a contributor of numerous articles and book reviews to learned journals, literary magazines, and weekly reviews.