Becoming an Active Reader offers a three-in-one approach that combines a guide to rhetorical writing, an engaging reader, and a detailed grammar handbook, all in a single volume. The advice and exercises found throughout help students understand and apply the most effective reading and writingstrategies, while the 39 thought-provoking readings encourage meaningful interaction with the written word. Annotated sample student essays, individual and collaborative exercises, checklists, and grammar hints appear throughout to help students navigate effective strategies for reading andwriting.

Now in a second edition, The Active Reader offers a practical, integrated treatment of academic reading and writing at the post-secondary level. Thirty-eight thought-provoking essays that highlight a variety of disciplines and rhetorical patterns are accompanied by comprehension and analysisexercises that encourage students to apply critical thinking skills to common assignments. Featuring an abundance of engaging new readings and learning aids throughout, along with an eye-catching redesign, this edition helps students become confident readers and writers.

Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing. You are reading to learn about writing. Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a particular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?

Adapting the methods of the much admired and extremely successful composition anthology Ways of Reading, this brief reader offers eight substantial essays about visual culture (illustrated with evocative photographs) along with demanding and innovative apparatus that engages students in conversations about the power of images.