Thoughtful Writing, through its advice and through its muscle-memory-developing exercises, teaches students how to succeed at any kind of investigative or argumentative writing. Its training in how to find and use telling details solves the mystifying problem of how to write enough words to fill your required number of pages. This text demonstrates how to move from facts to inferences to a thesis and helps you write thesis statements that are genuinely thoughtful. It helps give warmth and life to your writing by making you conscious that you are writing for readers that you respect. It very specifically shows you how to conduct research - how to learn from people, from books, and from the vast resources on the internet. Its chapters on organizing, paragraphing, revising, and punctuating help you achieve professional standards of presentation. It teaches English grammar in a more enjoyable and useful way than does any other writing textbook. All in all, it helps you produce writing that is, in both the humane and the intellectual senses of the term, genuinely thoughtful.

★ Publishers Weekly starred review A Best Book of 2018 in Religion, Publishers Weekly Reading great literature well has the power to cultivate virtue, says acclaimed author Karen Swallow Prior. In this book, she takes readers on a guided tour through works of great literature both ancient and modern, exploring twelve virtues that philosophers and theologians throughout history have identified as most essential for good character and the good life. Covering authors from Henry Fielding to Cormac McCarthy, Jane Austen to George Saunders, and Flannery O'Connor to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Prior explores some of the most compelling universal themes found in the pages of classic books, helping readers learn to love life, literature, and God through their encounters with great writing. The book includes end-of-chapter reflection questions geared toward book club discussions, original artwork throughout, and a foreword by Leland Ryken. The hardcover edition was named a Best Book of 2018 in Religion by Publishers Weekly. "[A] lively treatise on building character through books.'"--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Packed with customizable editing tools—this practical, up-to-date reference includes the latest on writing and editing online The McGraw-Hill Desk Reference for Editors, Writers, and Proofreaders is an indispensable resource for writers, editors, proofreaders, and virtually everyone responsible for crafting clear, polished writing. Ideal for professionals and novices alike, it guides you through the entire proofreading and editing process and features more than 25 downloadable interactive tools and checklists. This all-in-one package offers style sheet templates, a list of editor’s symbols, comprehensive editing and proofreading checklists, and guides to commonly misspelled and confused words. It also presents advice on electronically editing and proofreading for the Web.

Bruce Horner’s Rewriting Composition: Terms of Exchange shows how dominant inflections of key terms in composition—language, labor, value/evaluation, discipline, and composition itself—reinforce composition’s low institutional status and the poor working conditions of many of its instructors and tutors. Placing the circulation of these terms in multiple contemporary contexts, including globalization, world Englishes, the diminishing role of labor and the professions, the “information” economy, and the privatization of higher education, Horner demonstrates ways to challenge debilitating definitions of these terms and to rework them and their relations to one another. Each chapter of Rewriting Composition focuses on one key term, discussing how limitations set by dominant definitions shape and direct what compositionists do and how they think about their work. The first chapter, “Composition,” critiques a discourse of composition as lacking and therefore as in need of being either put to an end, renamed, aligned with other fields, or supplemented with work in other disciplines or other forms of composition. Rather than seeing composition as something to be abandoned, replaced, or supplemented, Horner suggests ways of productively engaging with the ordinary work of composition whose ostensible lack is assumed in the dominant discourse. Subsequent chapters apply this reconsideration to other key terms, critiquing dominant conceptions of “language” and English as stable; examining how “labor” in composition is divorced from the productive force of social relations to which language work contributes; rethinking the terms of value by which the labor of composition teachers, administrators, and students is measured; and questioning the application of conventional definitions of professional academic disciplinarity to composition. By exposing limitations in dominant conceptions of the work of composition and by modeling and opening up space for new conceptions of key terms, Rewriting Composition offers teachers of composition and rhetoric, writing scholars, and writing program administrators the critical tools necessary for charting the future of composition studies.

Writing With, Through, and Beyond the Text: An Ecology of Language elaborates an understanding of writing, its influences on our interpretations of experience and identity, and its potential for enabling individuals to learn about and connect to the world beyond themselves. Rather than considering writing a process, the author describes it as a system, an ecology that engages the individual in a variety of socially constituted and interacting systems. The book examines the pedagogical and curricular implications of this approach to writing, considering what it means to write and teach writing in ways that understand and acknowledge the ecological character of writing. This is an illuminating text for a wide audience of faculty, professionals, and graduate students in English, writing, education, and women's studies/feminist theory.