Description
Our goal for The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing has always been to provide the clear guidance and practical strategies students need to harness their potential as writers, both in college and in the wider world. We also strive to provide both experienced and novice instructors with the time-tested tools they need to coach their students as they develop skills for writing successfully in college and beyond. These goals have guided our development of the core features of the Guide as well as the many exciting features that keep the eleventh edition fresh and useful.
Core Features of the Guide
The St. Martin’s Guide retains its emphasis on active learning by providing practical guides to writing and integrating reading and writing through hands-on activities for critical thinking, reading, analysis, and synthesis.
Practical Guides to Writing
Each chapter in Part One offers practical, flexible guides that help students draft and revise a variety of analytical and persuasive essays. Honed by experience, the acclaimed writing guides offer surefire invention strategies to get students started, sentence strategies to get students writing, and thoughtful peer review and troubleshooting strategies to help students make their writing effective for any rhetorical situation. Commonsensical and easy to follow, the Guides to Writing teach students how to assess the rhetorical situation, focusing on purpose and audience, with special attention to the basic features of each assignment type; ask probing analytical questions about what they’re reading that can help make students more reflective writers; practice finding answers through various kinds of research, including memory search, field research, and traditional source-based research.
Each Guide to Writing begins with a Starting Points chart, offering students multiple ways of finding the help they need when they need it. Each also includes a Peer Review Guide to help students assess their own writing and the writing of their classmates and a Troubleshooting Guide to help students find ways to improve their drafts. All of these guides are organized and color-coded to emphasize the assignment’s basic features. In short, the Guides to Writing help students make their writing thoughtful, clear, organized, compelling—and effective for the rhetorical situation.
Purpose-Driven Assignment Chapters
Each chapter in Part One introduces a commonly assigned reason for writing. By working through several assignment types, students learn to identify and use relevantand effective strategies to achieve their purpose with their readers. “Remembering an Event,” a memoir assignment, challenges students to reflect on the autobiographical and cultural significance of their experience, for example. “Explaining a Concept,” an analysis assignment, asks students to make a new subject interesting and informative for their readers. A cluster of argument chapters — from “Arguing a Position” and “Proposing a Solution” to “Justifying an Evaluation” and “Arguing for Causes or Effects” — requires students to develop an argument that is not only well reasoned and well supported but also responds constructively to readers’ likely questions and concerns.
Systematic Integration of Critical Reading and Reflective Writing Students are asked to read and analyze a range of contemporary selections, attending both to the writer’s ideas and to the strategies the writer uses to present those ideas to readers. Each Guide to Reading provides an annotated student essay that prompts readers to answer questions about how it is composed; a range of compelling professional selections to demonstrate the basic features of writing with that purpose; activities following each professional selection that prompt students to read actively by asking them to reflect on the essay and relate it to their own experience and also to read like writers by focusing their attention on the writer’s strategies. (Chapter 12 also provides an array of strategies students can use to read critically.)