Writing in the Works Rhetoric, Reader, and Handbook for College and Beyond

Writing in the Works--an innovative rhetoric, reader, research guide, and handbook--treats students as writers rather than as students who write. Throughout the text, engaging assignments encourage students to view themselves as writers in many different contexts--in their personal lives, in their academic careers, and in their roles as group and community members--thus providing them with important, satisfying, and practical reasons to write. A comprehensive ancillary package complements the text with dynamic learning tools for students and time-saving, course management resources for instructors. The supplements include the Online Study Center for students, the WriteSpace online writing program, and the SMARTHINKING live, online tutoring service. Ten assignment chapters--organized from least to most complex and from personal to public writing--present a genre within one or more rhetorical modes. Students learn, for example, elements of narration through memoirs and news stories. Accompanying writing tasks teach students how to effectively structure different types of writing--including exposition, narration, argumentation, analysis, and persuasion pieces. Students also learn about the role of research and visual aids in writing. Contemporary and topical readings from such publications as The New Yorker, Popular Science, Utne Reader, Chicago Tribune, and a variety of web sites provide diverse writing models from professional and student writers. Interviews with featured writers--such as Roger Ebert, Susan Orlean, and Antonya Nelson--give students an inside view of the writing process presented in a particular chapter, as well as the author's motivation and purpose. The Visual Literacy feature in each chapter asks students to look at and analyze a variety of images--photographs, drawings, paintings, and cartoons--and how they work with the written text. The Research Paths component in every chapter encourages students to think about how a writer might apply research to a specific problem or inquiry. The documentation chapter shows students how to cite sources in the most up-to-date MLA and APA formats and provides a student model documented clearly in both formats. A grammar and style handbook appears at the end of the text and can be used as a step-by-step guide to build grammar knowledge (with brief exercises to check student progress), as a reference handbook, or as a grammar review tool.