A Guide to College Writing, MLA Update

For courses in First-Year Composition – Rhetoric.

This version of A Guide to Writing in College has been updated to reflect the 8th Edition of the MLA Handbook (April 2016)*

 

Helps students navigate the challenges of writing in all college-level courses

A Guide to College Writing is both an excellent introduction to college writing for composition courses that emphasize writing across the curriculum (WAC) and a writing guide for use in any college course. Scholar and former CWPA president Chris Anson brings his research on and knowledge of WAC, threshold concepts, and transference to this first-year writing text.

 

Anson offers a refreshing new choice to faculty seeking support in teaching the features and forms of other disciplines. The text does not teach any one form, but rather how to observe, analyze, and reproduce the forms and intellectual strategies of whatever the students might be asked to read and write. Students are walked through the writing process, beginning with shorter, lower-stakes “microtheme” assignments and scaffolding toward longer, sustained formal projects typical of their discipline. Throughout, students learn how to use writing as a learning tool.

 

* The 8th Edition introduces sweeping changes to the philosophy and details of MLA works cited entries. Responding to the “increasing mobility of texts,” MLA now encourages writers to focus on the process of crafting the citation, beginning with the same questions for any source. These changes, then, align with current best practices in the teaching of writing which privilege inquiry and critical thinking over rote recall and rule-following.

Chris Anson is Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Campus Writing and Speaking Program at North Carolina State University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in language, composition, and literacy and works with faculty across the curriculum to reform undergraduate education in the areas of writing and speaking. Before moving to NCSU in 1999, he spent fifteen years at the University of Minnesota, where he directed the Program in Composition from 1988-96 and was Professor of English and Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor. He received his Ph.D. and second M.A. in English with a specialization in composition studies from Indiana University, and his B.A. and first M.A. in English from Syracuse University.
Chris has received numerous awards, including the North Carolina State University Alumni Association Distinguished Graduate Professor Award, the State of Minnesota Higher Education Teaching Excellence Award, the Morse-Alumni Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education, and the Governor's Star Service Award for his service-learning work at Minnesota. He was an NCTE Promising Researcher Award Finalist and has received or participated as a co-principal investigator in over $1.8 million in grants.
An avid writer, Chris has published 15 books and over 110 journal articles and book chapters and is on the editorial or reader's boards of ten journals, including College Composition and Communication, College English, Research in the Teaching of English, Across the Disciplines, Written Communication, Assessing Writing, and The Journal of Writing Assessment. He is currently working on research exploring the effect of teachers' oral screencast responses on students' understanding and improvement of their writing.
Chris has given over 550 conference papers, keynote addresses, and invited lectures and faculty workshops across the U.S. and in 29 other countries.
Chris has served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (2011-14; Chair, 2013) and as President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (2002-2005) and spent seven additional years on the WPA Executive Board. He has also served on the CCCC Executive Committee (1993-96 and 2011-14) and 11 other CCCC committees, as well as several NCTE committees. He chaired the NCTE Assembly for Research in 1992-3 and was program co-chair of the NCTE Global Conference on Language and Literacy in Utrecht, Netherlands. He chaired the WPA Task Force on Plagiarism and the WPA Task Force on Internationalization, and formed the MMLA's Writing-Across-the-Curriculum section.