This composition guide for students teaches writing from the perspective of readers. Rather than laying out grammatical rules, the text focuses on how readers make decisions concerning what a given sentence or paragraph means. This approach is intended to help students realize what they already intu.

Explains the multimodal connections of text, image, space, body, sound and speech, in both old and new computer-mediated communication systems.

This instructor resource approaches the teaching of writing by focusing on readers' expectations, explaining the perceptive patterns that readers follow in their interpretive process. Examining reader expectations, this text argues that the structural location of a word is often more important than word choice in a reader's interpretation of a piece of writing. Expectations shows how readers gather contextual clues based not on what specific words mean, but on where those words appear in the structure of a sentence or paragraph. It then discusses how to bring these intuitive processes to conscious thought, allowing students to understand and control how readers perceive their writing.

The renowned novelist and author of This Year You Write a Novel shares a “compact but insight-rich” guide to fiction writing (Publishers Weekly). In his essential writing guide, This Year You Write Your Novel, Walter Mosley supplied aspiring writers with the basic tools to write a novel in one year. In this complementary follow up, Mosley guides the writer through the elements of not just any fiction writing, but the kind of writing that transcends convention and truly stands out. For writers who want to approach the genius of Melville, Dickens, or Twain, The Elements of Fiction is a must-read. Mosley demonstrates how to master fiction’s most essential elements: character and char-acter development, plot and story, voice and narrative, context and description, and more. The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from the blank page to the first draft to rewriting, and rewriting again. Throughout, The Elements of Fiction is enriched by brilliant demonstrative examples that Mosley himself has written here for the first time.

For as long as writing has been taught, the subject has always been approached from the perspective of polite society. The central questions were all writer-based: What can, must, ought the writer to do? What cannot, must not, ought not the writer to do? Mistakes were corrected; awkwardness was chastised; bloat was deflated. We were urged to avoid (the passive) and contain (the number of words in a sentence). But far less often were we told how to go about building a sentence; and almost never were we told why all this advice was supposed to work. The whole perspective was wrong: Instead of looking at the writer, we should have been looking at the far more important person where writing is concerned-the reader. George Gopen's radical new take on the language, his Reader Expectation Approach, explains how readers go about the act of reading. If we knew how readers make sense of a text, then we could tell the writers, who in turn could then structure their sentences to control most of the reader's interpretive process. The core of Gopen's new approach, and the reason it is a radical change, is a single discovery: Readers of English know where in the structure of a sentence or a paragraph to look for the arrival of certain kinds of crucial information. What's going on in a sentence? Whose story is it? How does it connect to the sentences that surround it? Which words should be read with the greatest emphasis, because they are the stars of that sentence's show? All of these questions are answered primarily by location: Readers know "where" in a sentence to look for "what." If writers know about these locations, then writers can fill them with the appropriate information and become completely accessible to their readers. Gopen's longer books explain all this in detail; in this volume, he sets out the essences and high points of his discoveries in tweet-length, almost proverb-like distillations. "Gopen's Reader Expectation Approach to the English Language" is part of the THiNKaha series, whose slim and handy books contain 140 well-thought-out AhaMessages. Increase your influence by picking up the Aha Amplifier to easily share George's quotes on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.

This eighth edition of Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, like the previous editions, is written for the student who is beginning a serious study of imaginative literature.

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.