Frameworks for Writing – serie

Nancy S. Gorrell leads educators into her own decades-long journey of becoming a teacher who writes and who nurtures students and colleagues as writers and co-learners. The chronology moves through the author's evolution as a creative writer, a teacher-writer, and then a teacher-artist, all the while writing and learning with her students in English classes and reaching out to students and teachers across the curriculum. The book serves as both an inspirational account of Gorrell's personal story of becoming and as a guidebook for teachers to reflect on and create their own analogous story of becoming. Each chapter includes an illustrative teaching story or poem and the author's reflections on her evolving journey, along with model student writing intended to both instruct and inspire readers and their students in their own writing. It also contains reflective exercises for teachers to work through and teaching activities that they can use in their classes. An additional feature of the book is its attention to writing across the curriculum and its inclusion of interdisciplinary models and applications. The book incorporates the work of the author as well as that of her many collaborators, including a number of interdisciplinary contributors and former students.

Nancy S. Gorrell leads educators into her own decades-long journey of becoming a teacher who writes and who nurtures students and colleagues as writers and co-learners. The chronology moves through the author's evolution as a creative writer, a teacher-writer, and then a teacher-artist, all the while writing and learning with her students in English classes and reaching out to students and teachers across the curriculum. The book serves as both an inspirational account of Gorrell's personal story of becoming and as a guidebook for teachers to reflect on and create their own analogous story of becoming. Each chapter includes an illustrative teaching story or poem and the author's reflections on her evolving journey, along with model student writing intended to both instruct and inspire readers and their students in their own writing. It also contains reflective exercises for teachers to work through and teaching activities that they can use in their classes. An additional feature of the book is its attention to writing across the curriculum and its inclusion of interdisciplinary models and applications. The book incorporates the work of the author as well as that of her many collaborators, including a number of interdisciplinary contributors and former students.

Creativity and Discovery in the University Writing Class: A Teacher’s Guide presents ideas for teaching writing at university level which recognize the need in the current world to be continually innovating in response to rapidly changing student populations and conditions, including advances in media and writing technologies. The volume emphasizes the creativity of all forms of writing and the important role of discovery in teaching, learning, and the acquisition of knowledge of all kinds. The volume brings together distinguished scholars in writing pedagogy from different educational and cultural contexts who took part in a Summer Institute on Creativity and Discovery in the Teaching of Writing at City University of Hong Kong in June 2013. Designed for teachers of writing based on lectures and workshops given at the summer institute, the collection offers both theoretical insights and practical suggestions for classroom activities that teachers of writing will be able to go to for materials and guidance.

Writing Better Essays, now in its second edition, is an authoritative but accessible guide to writing successful argumentative essays that combines classical approaches with practical advice tailored to contemporary students. Designed to be effective either in the classroom or for independent learning, the book will appeal students at all levels, ranging from advanced placement to post-graduate, its detailed explanations of key steps of the writing and editing process from conception through planning and execution ensuring that students will be able to create a coherent argumentative essay that features the classical circular and reiterative structure. The conversational style and tone of the book serves to give students much-needed confidence as they approach their writing, as does its extended explanation of the key skill of paragraphing and its commonsense advice on punctuation. Students should find that its extensive use of exercises, its well-chosen examples of good practice, and its emphasis on imitation makes it an ideal primary or secondary textbook for courses. Teachers of writing should appreciate the instructor’s guide at the beginning of the book as well as the consistent emphasis throughout on the need for students to commit themselves to practice and revision if they want to write effective argumentative essays.

Writing Better Essays, now in its second edition, is an authoritative but accessible guide to writing successful argumentative essays that combines classical approaches with practical advice tailored to contemporary students. Designed to be effective either in the classroom or for independent learning, the book will appeal students at all levels, ranging from advanced placement to post-graduate, its detailed explanations of key steps of the writing and editing process from conception through planning and execution ensuring that students will be able to create a coherent argumentative essay that features the classical circular and reiterative structure. The conversational style and tone of the book serves to give students much-needed confidence as they approach their writing, as does its extended explanation of the key skill of paragraphing and its commonsense advice on punctuation. Students should find that its extensive use of exercises, its well-chosen examples of good practice, and its emphasis on imitation makes it an ideal primary or secondary textbook for courses. Teachers of writing should appreciate the instructor’s guide at the beginning of the book as well as the consistent emphasis throughout on the need for students to commit themselves to practice and revision if they want to write effective argumentative essays.

Writing the Pandemic addresses the many challenges that writing instructors and students have faced since the arrival of COVID-19 and their ramifications for teaching and learning, including: Instructional Delivery – in-person, hybrid, and remote classes; Campus and Classroom Protocols – masking, distancing, and cleaning; Safety – quarantining, isolating, and reporting; and Justice – antiracism, political divides, and implications for education. The book is intended for an audience of first-year college composition teachers and other English and language arts instructors at the postsecondary and secondary levels who have experienced the seismic shifts in writing instruction and education more generally that have been necessitated by the pandemic. The author paints portraits of the pandemic experience that writing teachers and their students will relate to and offers practical learning material that can be used in writing courses. An original compilation of material on this theme, Writing the Pandemic includes reflections by a highly experienced writing instructor and his students together with ready-to-use assignments. It is written in a lively style by the author of English Composition Teacher’s Guidebook, Tom Mulder, an award-winning instructor who teaches at Grand Rapids Community College in Michigan. With each chapter, the author offers selected notes blogged at intervals during critical incidents in the unfolding coronavirus as well as individual students’ stories along with their photographs, both inside composition classrooms adapted for distanced learning and writing or working from home. He also presents questions for reflection and his own speculations about the future that are sure to stimulate readers’ own thoughts about what has changed, and how much, as a result of the pandemic, and about what writing instruction will look like going forward.

Designed for intermediate and advanced users of English, this book offers an integrated approach to essay writing by focusing on both the processes and products of writing. It has been developed over many years of teaching and researching written English, in particular, with university students in Thailand. In addition to addressing common issues involving written English which many novice writers face, it covers the basic elements of writing—sentences and paragraphs—and introduces students to descriptive, narrative, expository, and argumentative writing. The book’s content and layout are carefully tailored for student writers, as reflected in color highlighting of important text and images, placement of key information in boxes, and inclusion of plentiful exercises with answer keys. Care has also been taken to avoid formality and unnecessary complexity. Model examples taken from actual students’ essays as well as published texts help to ensure the book’s appeal and educational value to its intended audience of novice writers. Drawing on the Systemic Functional Linguistics of Michael Halliday and others, each of the five units begins with a form–function orientation. The purpose is to raise students’ awareness of the links between language structures at the micro-level of words, phrases, and clauses, and to introduce them to higher-order rhetorical goals at the macro-level of paragraphs and essays. Students learn to recognize and evaluate texts for key language features (formal knowledge), such as descriptive phrases, figurative language, and various types of transitions. Students then practice putting these elements together to form larger functional units (rhetorical knowledge), focusing on unity, cohesion, and a clear overall purpose. Each unit then focuses on generating ideas and content (subject knowledge) using critical questions, collaborative discussions, and visualization techniques. At strategic points, students are cycled through key reflective practices (process knowledge) as a way to help them complete longer writing tasks. These longer tasks include clear scoring rubrics, which can be used by the student or teacher as a means to gauge progress and provide feedback. The book will help students acquire essential knowledge alongside transferable and functional skills—both of which can be applied across areas of study and in future writing projects.