This book is meant as a practical guide to college writing. It starts with understanding and describing others' arguments, then moves on to assessing those arguments’ strengths and weaknesses and articulating our own points in response.
This introduction text is designed to exemplify how writers think about and produce text. The layout of the book implies there is a beginning, middle, and end to a writing course, but because writing is both an art and a skill, people will find their own processes for learning, improving, and using these skills. Writing processes differ because we are each looking for a workable schemata that fits our way of thinking. Try out a variety of writing processes and strategies, and find what works for you. If you are not uncomfortable on this journey, you simply are not stretching yet. Learning is prickly, awkward, and risky, so if it does not feel a bit unnerving, push harder and farther.
Technical Writing: An Open Educational Resource
Open TC is a freely accessible online textbook for technical communication, technical writing, workplace writing, and other related courses.
Effective Professional Communication: A Rhetorical Approach
The goal of this text is to break down the communication process in professional environments so you can maximize your chance to get hired and retain your job once you graduate from university. The authors do this by looking at communication through political, rhetorical, ethical, and interpersonal lenses and applying this knowledge to your future career.
Web Writing (2023) by Dr. A Nicole Pfannenstiel is designed to provide a practical, rhetorical approach to web writing and content strategy analysis for students completing advanced writing courses. The eTextbook uses the rhetorical situation and key concepts to help readers/students understand how to write within specific web spaces for specific audiences drawing on appropriate discourse community conventions. It includes a chapter devoted to the rhetorical situation and key concepts to help students analyze and build their understanding of existing communication. It also includes a chapter outlining approaches to content strategy analysis, using the rhetorical situation and key concepts to understand the rich public data provided through social media accounts to support learners understanding effective web writing. The content analysis overview helps students build skills for analyzing writing, for collecting and analyzing qualitative and quantitative social media data, and for drawing conclusions about content strategy best practices.
Writing In College: From Competence to Excellence by Amy Guptill
Writing in College is designed for students who have largely mastered high-school level conventions of formal academic writing and are now moving beyond the five-paragraph essay to more advanced engagement with text. It is well suited to composition courses or first-year seminars and valuable as a supplemental or recommended text in other writing-intensive classes. It provides a friendly, down-to-earth introduction to professors' goals and expectations, demystifying the norms of the academy and how they shape college writing assignments. Each of the nine chapters can be read separately, and each includes suggested exercises to bring the main messages to life.
This text aligns with the goals, topics, and objectives of many first-year writing and composition courses. It is organized according to relevant genres, and focuses on the writing process, effective writing practices or strategies—including graphic organizers, writing frames, and word banks to support visual learning—and conventions of usage and style. The text includes an editing and documentation handbook, which provides information on grammar and mechanics, common usage errors, and citation styles.
UNM Core Writing Grammar Guide
This guide to grammar was designed with two overarching goals: to help students improve their fluency in standardized edited American English while valuing and, at times, incorporating the linguistic diversity of the various communities students inhabit.
This text explores the art and craft of writing, exploring various forms, styles, and purposes of composition. Four distinct units are covered, each designed to equip students with the necessary information to complete the four major assignments in the course.
Informed Arguments: A Guide to Writing and Research
This text was designed not only to teach students about composition and rhetoric, but about research skills, too. The editors of this text maintain that research skills have rhetorical elements. Note: that this text includes specific examples from Texas A&M library website but does have a CC-BY-NC-SA license
Fundamentals of Engineering Technical Communications
This textbook introduces the general principles of technical communication in the context of engineering, serves as a guide during the writing process, and provides links to additional resources.
Business Writing For Everyone is an inclusive guide to writing in the workplace. The book takes a process-oriented, storytelling approach to composition: focusing less on genre and more on the decisions that effective business communicators make. Business Writing For Everyone also contains interactive H5P activities for students to test their learning, and activities for further reflection that instructors can use in the classroom or assign as homework.
