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.

CRITICAL THINKING, THOUGHTFUL WRITING begins with the premise that thinking well involves using language well, and vice versa. This rhetoric with readings--written by critical-thinking scholar John Chaffee and English professors Christine McMahon and Barbara Stout--provides thorough coverage of the writing process, going beyond the traditional rhetoric to teach students how to evaluate sources, images, and arguments. Each chapter focuses on a critical-thinking skill--such as problem solving or analysis of complex issues--that is explored through "Thinking-Writing Activities" and thematically linked readings. The text helps students develop these skills through carefully sequenced pedagogy and a cross-disciplinary approach that asks them to complete writing assignments and critically evaluate readings drawn from a variety of disciplines. The Fifth Edition offers new readings, a new "Thinking Critically About New Media" feature in each chapter, and more photos, which emphasize visual rhetoric.

Helps students build skills in writing, learning, proof-reading, grammar and test-taking.

- MLA and APA documentation and research paper styles- Student models of critical college writing forms- Clear guidelines for citing print and electronic sources- Writing process and Proofreading Guides

Even if your writing workshop hums with the sound of productive work most days, with time carved out for sharing and reflecting, how do you know whether your students are really learning from their writing experiences, or if they're just going through the motions of writing? What if you could teach your students to reflect-in a powerful, deliberate way-throughout the writing process? Teaching Writers to Reflect shares a three step process-remember, describe, act--to help students develop as writers who know for themselves what they are doing and why. The authors argue that teaching the skill of reflection helps students: - Build identities as writers within a community of writers - Learn what to do when there's a problem in their writing - Make writing skills transferable to more than one writing situation. With specific teaching strategies, examples of student work and stories from their own classrooms, Whitney, McCracken and Washell help you align the work of reflection with your writing workshop structure. After learning to reflect on what they do as writers, students not only can say things about the texts they have written, but also can talk about their own abilities, challenges, and the processes by which they solve writing problems.

It’s a writer’s job to create compelling characters who can withstand life’s fallout without giving up. But building authentic, memorable heroes is no easy task. To forge realistic characters, we must hobble them with flaws that set them back while giving them positive attributes to help them achieve their goals. So how do writers choose the right blend of strengths for their characters—attributes that will render them admirable and worth rooting for—without making it too easy for them to succeed? Character creation can be hard, but it’s about to get a lot easier. Inside The Positive Trait Thesaurus, you’ll find: * A large selection of attributes to choose from when building a personality profile. Each entry lists possible causes for why a trait might emerge, along with associated attitudes, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions * Real character examples from literature, film, or television to show how an attribute drives actions and decisions, influences goals, and steers relationships * Advice on using positive traits to immediately hook readers while avoiding common personality pitfalls * Insight on human needs and morality, and how each determines the strengths that emerge in heroes and villains alike * Information on the key role positive attributes play within the character arc, and how they’re vital to overcoming fatal flaws and achieving success * Downloadable tools for organizing a character’s attributes and providing a deeper understanding of his past, his needs, and the emotional wounds he must overcome If you find character creation difficult or worry that your cast members all seem the same, The Positive Trait Thesaurus is brimming with ideas to help you develop one-of-a-kind, dynamic characters that readers will love. Extensively indexed, with entries written in a user-friendly list format, this brainstorming resource is perfect for any character creation project.