Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing, The

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Grounded in current theory and research, yet practical and teachable.

The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing takes a distinctive pedagogical approach that integrates composition research with rhetorical theory and insights from writing across the curriculum. It treats writing and reading both as rhetorical acts and as processes of problem posing, inquiry, critical thinking, analysis, and argument. Its aim is to evoke the kind of deep learning that allows students to transfer compositional and rhetorical skills across disciplines and professional fields. Teachers and students value its clear and coherent explanations, engaging classroom activities, and flexible sequence of aims-based writing assignments that help writers produce effective, idea-rich essays in academic and civic genres. Numerous examples of student and professional writing accompany this thorough guide to the concepts and skills needed for writing, researching, and editing in college and beyond.

The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing, 8th Edition is also available via Revel™, an interactive learning environment that enables students to read, practice, and study in one continuous experience. Learn more.

John Ramage received his BA in philosophy from Whitman College and his Ph.D. in English from Washington State University. He served for over thirty years on the faculties of Montana State University and Arizona State University. In addition to his teaching duties, which included both graduate and undergraduate courses in writing and rhetoric, literary theory and modern literature, Dr. Ramage served as a writing program administrator overseeing writing across the curriculum and composition programs and writing centers. At Arizona State university, he was the founding executive director of the university's Division of Undergraduate Academic Services, responsible for academic support services campus-wide.

In addition to The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing, Dr. Ramage was the co-author of the textbooks Form and Surprise in Composition, and Writing Arguments, currently in its 9th edition. He was also the lead author for Argument in Composition, and the sole author of Rhetoric: A User's Guide, and Twentieth Century American Success Rhetoric: How to Construct a Suitable Self. He is currently writing a book about political rhetoric.   

John C. Bean is an emeritus professor of English at Seattle University, where he held the title of “Consulting Professor of Writing and Assessment.” He has an undergraduate degree from Stanford (1965) and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1972). He is the author of an internationally used book on writing across the curriculum--Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd edition (Jossey-Bass, 2011). He is also the co-author of The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing as well as two other influential composition textbooks–Writing Arguments and Reading Rhetorically. He has published numerous articles on writing and writing-across-the-curriculum as well as on literary subjects including Shakespeare and Spenser. His current research interests focus on pedagogical strategies for teaching undergraduate research including quantitative literacy, disciplinary methods of inquiry and argument, and the problem of “transfer of learning” as students move through and across a curriculum. A concomitant research interest is the development of institutional assessment strategies that promote productive faculty conversations about teaching and learning. In 2001, he presented a keynote address at the first annual conference of the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing at the University of Groningen. He has delivered lectures and conducted workshops on writing-across-the-curriculum throughout the United States and Canada as well as for universities in Germany, Bangladesh, Ghana, and Zambia. In 2010 his article “Messy Problems and Lay Audiences:  Teaching Critical Thinking within the Finance Curriculum” (co-authored with colleagues from finance and economics) won the 2009 McGraw-Hill — Magna Publications Award for the year’s best “scholarly work on teaching and learning.”

June Johnson is an associate professor of English, Director of Writing Studies, and Writing Consultant to the University Core at Seattle University. She has a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Education from Stanford and an M.A. in English from Mills College. After chairing the English department of a preparatory school in Los Angeles and working as a development editor in educational publishing, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. At Seattle University, she supervises the teaching of first-year academic writing seminars as well as teaches these courses and advanced argument and composition theory in the Writing Studies minor. Her research areas include global studies, reflective writing, first-year composition, writing transfer, argumentation, and Rogerian communication–subjects on which she conducts workshops at Seattle University and at institutions around the country. She has published articles in American Studies on women’s writing about the West in the nineteenth century. She is the co-author (with John Bean) of The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing, a text known for its foundation in writing-across-the-curriculum pedagogy and its useful introduction to academic writing and co-author (also with John Bean) of Writing Arguments, and she authored Global Issues, Local Arguments, 3rd edition (Pearson, 2014), an argument reader and rhetoric with a civic literacy focus that provides a cross-curricular introduction to global problems.

Part 1. A Rhetoric for Writers
1. Posing Problems: The Demands of College Writing, Reading, and Critical Thinking
2. Exploring Problems: Making Claims
3. Thinking Critically About Rhetorical Problems
4. How Messages Persuade
5. Thinking Critically About Document Design, Visual Rhetoric, and Multimodal Messages

Part 2. Writing Projects

6. Reading Rhetorically: The Writer as Strong Reader
7. Writing an Autobiographical Narrative
8. Writing an Exploratory Essay or Annotated Bibliography
9. Writing an Informative (and Surprising) Essay or Report

10. Analyzing Images
11. Writing a Literary Analysis Essay
12. Writing a Scientific Research Report
13. Analyzing and Synthesizing Ideas
14. Writing a Classical Argument
15. Making an Evaluation
16. Proposing a Solution

Part 3. A Guide to Composing and Revising
17. Writing as a Problem-Solving Process
18. Strategies for Writing Closed-Form Prose
19. Strategies for Writing Open-Form Prose
20. Strategies for Composing Multimodal Texts

Part 4. A Rhetorical Guide to Research
21. Asking Questions, Finding Sources
22. Evaluating Sources
23. Incorporating Sources into Your Own Writing
24. Citing and Documenting Sources

Part 5. Writing for Assessment

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