Common Places, along with its author-created teaching resources and Connect Integrated Reading and Writing (a state-of-the-art learning technology product), represent a cohesive instructional framework to accelerate college readiness. With a seamlessly integrated foundation in reading and writing strategies, Common Places offers unique purpose-oriented projects for upper level IRW courses and provides a fresh approach to grammar that emphasizes sentence combining and grammar in context.

Common Ground, the lower-level integrated reading and writing (IRW) companion text to the best-selling textbook Common Places, guides students through the reading and writing process at the sentence and paragraph level. Providing an easy-to-follow blueprint for students by modeling skills and behavior without being wordy, Common Ground helps students break down each reading and writing skill with step-by-step guidance and clear visuals. Carefully selected readings equip students not only with writing skills but also with the life skills they will need for their college careers and beyond. Common Ground’s extensive and easy-to use grammar and mechanics handbook, included in the text, is tailor-made for IRW students. The methodology relies on building blocks and takes a granular approach, teaching students from the ground up to build confidence, and provides an easy-to-follow blueprint for students, modeling skills and behavior without being wordy. The text avoids making assumptions about students' prior knowledge or current understanding and answers even the most basic questions students might have about a topic. Students must learn to read from a writer's point of view and learn to write from a reader's point of view as this kind of self-awareness develops strong readers and writers. Content is presented through numerous graphics and tables that encapsulate processes. The graphic representation of material provides a visual reinforcement of concepts. The text is divided into five comprehensive parts that cover skills, projects, grammar, and readings. • Parts 1 and 2 (Chapters 1–12) cover basic and more advanced skills, ranging from subjects such as sentences and topics to critical thinking and argument. • Part 3 (Chapters 13–15) contains extended projects that provide students with a chance to work on activities requiring sustained attention. The projects are structured so that students can complete them in two to three weeks while they are mastering the skills in Chapters 1–12. • Part 4 contains the extensive and easy-to-use Grammar and Mechanics Handbook, which is tailored for IRW students, with a minimum of complex terminology. • Part 5, the Anthology of Readings, contains readings and accompanying pedagogy across three themes of high interest to students and features content that will support their college work and their careers. Lexile levels are given for all readings. A master Connect IRW course, Connect Integrated Reading and Writing: The Common Ground Master Course, aligns with chapters and features LearnSmart Achieve topics, chapter and vocabulary quizzes, and PowerPoint presentations as well as discussion board prompts for chapter concepts. Additionally, Power of Process assignments are built around selected chapter readings, and chapter reading and writing assignments are offered in the Power of Process tool and Writing Assignment features.

Together, Common Places content, the author-created teaching resources, and Connect Integrated Reading and Writing (a state-of-the-art learning technology product) represent a cohesive instructional framework to accelerate college readiness. With a seamlessly integrated foundation in reading and writing strategies, unique purpose-oriented projects for upper and lower level IRW courses, a fresh approach to grammar that emphasizes sentence combining and grammar in context, a step-by-step modeling approach guiding students to emulate the reading/writing cycle, and multiple features to promote metacognitive thinking, Common Places offers a flexible and adaptive approach suitable for any curriculum design or course sequence.

"To become good writers, students must learn more than a writing process: they must develop a writer's mindset-the rhetorical skills to read critically, analyze and synthesize sources, and write with their audiences in mind. How can we help students with the challenges involved in thinking like a writer? By using incremental steps that move from literal thinking to analytical and critical understanding, The Writer's Mindset makes the development of college-level writing capabilities possible for all students, whatever their level of preparedness. Students are guided to use rhetorical thinking, and in so doing, their ability to emulate the strategies of successful writers develops, and their capacity to use intentional, audience-based strategies in their own writing increases. The Writer's Mindset provides students with tools to transform the way they approach reading, writing, and arguing through five key pillars. Rhetorical Focus All successful writing-from an informative report to an argument-depends on the writer's audience awareness and rhetorical skill. The Writer's Mindset helps students understand and develop the rhetorical thinking needed for any writing purpose. Incremental Approach The Writer's Mindset breaks down the thinking required to be an effective writer and offers students methods to develop a writer's mindset in incremental steps. Embedded Support The Writer's Mindset helps even struggling students develop high-level reading, writing, and arguing skills by offering extra help for the more difficult topics and tasks. Student Appeal The Writer's Mindset meets students' needs for relevancy and value. The approachable tone, high-interest readings, and reflective writing prompts help students make personal connections with the content. The breadth of coverage allows the text to be used in both semesters of composition, making it a great value. Instructor Support The Writer's Mindset offers extensive instructor support created by the author, a writing professor with over thirty years' experience, including an annotated instructor's edition; topical PowerPoints; teaching plans for face-to-face courses, online courses, and co-requisite courses; chapter tests; a pre-created Connect course; and much more. The five pillars are supported by McGraw-Hill Connect for Composition. McGraw-Hill Education Connect is a digital assignment and learning platform that strengthens the link between faculty, students, and coursework. With a suite of comprehensive and flexible resources designed to help students meet outcomes in First-Year Composition while reducing instructor workload, Connect Composition includes SmartBook 2.0, Writing Assignment Premium, Power of Process, Adaptive Learning Assignments, and instructor resources. Rhetorical Focus"--

Common Places represents a cohesive instructional framework to accelerate college readiness. Teaching reading and writing together requires more than just combining separate reading and writing pedagogies. This textbook helps students read from a writer's point of view and write with an imagined reader ever present. It introduces the importance of emotional intelligence, problem solving, metacognition, and self-advocacy. The students integrate skills and are challenged to develop literacy skills by engaging in real-world projects. By developing their skills in this context, students acquire the literacy skills they need to pass challenging college-level courses. In addition to integrating and accelerating instruction, the pedagogy embeds content designed to foster the emotional intelligence development, metacognition, and problem-solving skills students often lack, yet which are correlated with higher grade point averages and a greater capacity to learn. Upper-level projects feature four readings on specific topics and require students to read and analyze the selections and then integrate them effectively in their own source-based, documented essay. Purpose-oriented projects keep students interested and motivated. The handbook puts a strong emphasis on sentence combining and grammar in context. The logical and clear framework presented in Common Places provides an abundance of models that help build students' confidence in their ability to master specific skills as they work through the chapters and the projects. Students are able to model behavior based on the features included in the chapters. The text employs several strategies to help students master the skills of reading and writing in an integrated fashion: *Scaffolded instruction presents reading and writing processes from the ground up. *Students are prompted to think their way through the steps the text provides, not just follow them. *Students are guided to select and combine patterns of development that fit writing purposes-informing, analyzing, evaluating, and persuading. *Sentence combining helps students develop true grammatical competency. *High-interest readings of various lengths from a variety of sources are analyzed for Lexile level. *Graphics replace dense sections of text and gradually transition to text. *Chapters include a variety of methods to inform, engage, and increase skills, such as a fictional student and a new theme on fast food. *LearnSmart Achieve offers an adaptive, individualized learning experience to teach reading and writing skills in tandem, targeting students' particular strengths and weaknesses. *Instructors may add the Grammar and Mechanics Handbook from Common Ground, the lower-level text in this program. *Common Places and Connect Integrated Reading and Writing (a state-of-the-art learning technology product) provide a cohesive instructional framework to accelerate college readiness. New to This Edition *A new introduction to the projects section provides the step-by-step process a hypothetical student uses to complete a project, giving students a specific example of how to complete a project from start to finish with easy-to-follow steps. *Emotional intelligence is given an in-depth focus throughout the second edition, helping students relate elements of their development to their personal growth outside the classroom. *Features like Thinking from an Instructor's Point of View exercises enable students to develop multiple points of view.