Highly practical and accessible, this indispensable book provides clear-cut strategies for improving K-12 writing instruction. The contributors are leading authorities who demonstrate proven ways to teach different aspects of writing, with chapters on planning, revision, sentence construction, handwriting, spelling, and motivation. The use of the Internet in instruction is addressed, and exemplary approaches to teaching English-language learners and students with special needs are discussed. The book also offers best-practice guidelines for designing an effective writing program. Focusing on everyday applications of current scientific research, the book features many illustrative case examples and vignettes.
This series takes students from beginning-level instruction on basic sentence structure through the development and production of advanced academic papers. Examples of student compositions, written by native and non-native speakers of English, as well as pair and group work enrich all three books.
For students, scientists, journalists and others, a comprehensive guide to communicating data clearly and effectively. Acclaimed by scientists, journalists, faculty, and students, The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers has helped thousands communicate data clearly and effectively. It offers a much-needed bridge between good quantitative analysis and clear expository writing, using straightforward principles and efficient prose. With this new edition, Jane Miller draws on a decade of additional experience and research, expanding her advice on reaching everyday audiences and further integrating non-print formats. Miller, an experienced teacher of research methods, statistics, and research writing, opens by introducing a set of basic principles for writing about numbers, then presents a toolkit of techniques that can be applied to prose, tables, charts, and presentations. She emphasizes flexibility, showing how different approaches work for different kinds of data and different types of audiences. The second edition adds a chapter on writing about numbers for lay audiences, explaining how to avoid overwhelming readers with jargon and technical issues. Also new is an appendix comparing the contents and formats of speeches, research posters, and papers, to teach writers how to create all three types of communication without starting each from scratch. An expanded companion website includes new multimedia resources such as slide shows and podcasts that illustrate the concepts and techniques, along with an updated study guide of problem sets and suggested course extensions. This continues to be the only book that brings together all the tasks that go into writing about numbers, integrating advice on finding data, calculating statistics, organizing ideas, designing tables and charts, and writing prose all in one volume. Field-tested with students and professionals alike, this is the go-to guide for everyone who writes or speaks about numbers.
The definitive reference in the field, this volume synthesizes current knowledge on writing development and instruction at all grade levels. Prominent scholars examine numerous facets of writing from sociocultural, cognitive, linguistic, neuroscience, and new literacy/technological perspectives. The volume reviews the evidence base for widely used instructional approaches, including those targeting particular components of writing. Issues in teaching specific populations--including students with disabilities and English learners--are addressed. Innovative research methods and analytic tools are clearly explained, and key directions for future investigation identified. New to This Edition *Chapters on genre instruction, evaluation and revision, argumentative writing, computer-based instruction, and professional development. *Chapters on new literacies, out-of-school writing, translation, and self-regulation. *Many new topics and authors, including more international perspectives. *Multiple chapters connect research findings to the Common Core writing standards. See also the editors' Best Practices in Writing Instruction, Second Edition, an accessible course text and practitioner's guide.
“This easy-to-follow guide is useful both as a general course of instruction and as a targeted aid in solving particular legal writing problems.” —Harvard Law Review Clear, concise, down-to-earth, and powerful—all too often, legal writing embodies none of these qualities. Its reputation for obscurity and needless legalese is widespread. For more than twenty years, Bryan A. Garner’s Legal Writing in Plain English has helped address this problem by providing lawyers, judges, paralegals, law students, and legal scholars with sound advice and practical tools for improving their written work. The leading guide to clear writing in the field, this indispensable volume encourages legal writers to challenge conventions and offers valuable insights into the writing process that will appeal to other professionals: how to organize ideas, create and refine prose, and improve editing skills. Accessible and witty, Legal Writing in Plain English draws on real-life writing samples that Garner has gathered through decades of teaching. Trenchant advice covers all types of legal materials, from analytical and persuasive writing to legal drafting, and the book’s principles are reinforced by sets of basic, intermediate, and advanced exercises in each section. In this new edition, Garner preserves the successful structure of the original while adjusting the content to make it even more classroom-friendly. He includes case examples from the past decade and addresses the widespread use of legal documents in electronic formats. His book remains the standard guide for producing the jargon-free language that clients demand and courts reward. “Those who are willing to approach the book systematically and to complete the exercises will see dramatic improvements in their writing.” —Law Library Journal
How to transform a thesis into a publishable work that can engage audiences beyond the academic committee. When a dissertation crosses my desk, I usually want to grab it by its metaphorical lapels and give it a good shake. “You know something!” I would say if it could hear me. “Now tell it to us in language we can understand!” Since its publication in 2005, From Dissertation to Book has helped thousands of young academic authors get their books beyond the thesis committee and into the hands of interested publishers and general readers. Now revised and updated to reflect the evolution of scholarly publishing, this edition includes a new chapter arguing that the future of academic writing is in the hands of young scholars who must create work that meets the broader expectations of readers rather than the narrow requirements of academic committees. At the heart of From Dissertation to Book is the idea that revising the dissertation is fundamentally a process of shifting its focus from the concerns of a narrow audience—a committee or advisors—to those of a broader scholarly audience that wants writing to be both informative and engaging. William Germano offers clear guidance on how to do this, with advice on such topics as rethinking the table of contents, taming runaway footnotes, shaping chapter length, and confronting the limitations of jargon, alongside helpful timetables for light or heavy revision. Germano draws on his years of experience in both academia and publishing to show writers how to turn a dissertation into a book that an audience will actually enjoy, whether reading on a page or a screen. He also acknowledges that not all dissertations can or even should become books and explores other, often overlooked, options, such as turning them into journal articles or chapters in an edited work. With clear directions, engaging examples, and an eye for the idiosyncrasies of academic writing, he reveals to recent PhDs the secrets of careful and thoughtful revision—a skill that will be truly invaluable as they add “author” to their curriculum vitae.
Please note: The second edition of The Complete Legal Writer will be out in August. The Complete Legal Writer lives up to its name, providing everything legal research and writing professors and students need in a textbook, including citation literacy, research skills, writing process, a wide range of legal documents, and more. Using the cutting-edge Genre Discovery Approach, this book teaches students to guide themselves through the process of writing unfamiliar legal document types and thereby prepares students to write independently in upper-level classes and the workplace. To aid in teaching Genre Discovery, the authors provide three exacting samples of each document type covered in the book, a rhetorical analysis of each document type, and specific questions to guide students as they study the samples. The Complete Legal Writer covers document types that are traditionally taught in the first year, such as office memos and appellate briefs, as well as document types taught in upper-level and non-traditional first-year curricula, including trial briefs, demand letters, and employer blog posts. Furthermore, this book covers an essential skill for all legal writing classes: giving and receiving feedback. In addition to explaining how to give feedback to and receive feedback from peers, an important skill given the rise of peer-feedback practices in the LRW classroom, The Complete Legal Writer also covers how to receive and implement feedback from professors and workplace supervisors in order to improve both a particular document and future documents. "The Complete Legal Writer lives up to its name: it presents a comprehensive, fresh, and intuitive approach to teaching legal writing that invites students to confidently and enthusiastically cross the divide between their prior writing experiences and the world of legal writing. By giving students the tools they need to critically examine the documents that lawyers write, the authors'' genre-discovery approach empowers students to meet (and exceed) the expectations of their new reading audience, even when they are faced with the challenge of writing a document they may not have seen before. With the text''s warm tone, humorous touches, and vivid examples, the authors have hit a homerun that will engage faculty and students alike while arming students with skills they will use throughout their professional lives." -- Ruth Ann McKinney, Emerita Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law "This uniquely reader-centered text indeed empowers students to grow into complete legal writers. The authors gently yet firmly guide students through "genre discovery": careful study of sample legal documents, by which students construct for themselves the conceptual frameworks that writers of such documents need. Students thus till the soil, plant seeds of understanding, and harvest their own insights--and thereby enjoy "ground-up" rather than "top-down" learning that is refreshingly autonomous and remarkably effective." -- Craig T. Smith, Assistant Dean for the Writing and Learning Resources Center and Clinical Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law "The Complete Legal Writer promises much and delivers more. The text covers fundamental concepts including legal logic and analysis, research methodology, the writing process, and citation literacy. The overall tone is refreshingly readable and will undoubtedly resonate with students. What sets the text apart is not the wide variety of sample legal documents offered, but its potential to equip students with a method of evaluating all documents/genres using an approach that will prepare them to write and ultimately to practice more effectively. The rhetorical legal genre approach is quite a discovery, and no law library collection would be complete without this book." --Marie Summerlin Hamm, Law Library Journal
All students and professors need to write, and many struggle to finish their stalled dissertations, journal articles, book chapters, or grant proposals. Writing is hard work and can be difficult to wedge into a frenetic academic schedule. In this practical, light-hearted, and encouraging book, Paul Silvia explains that writing productively does not require innate skills or special traits but specific tactics and actions. Drawing examples from his own field of psychology, he shows readers how to overcome motivational roadblocks and become prolific without sacrificing evenings, weekends, and vacations. After describing strategies for writing productively, the author gives detailed advice from the trenches on how to write, submit, revise, and resubmit articles, how to improve writing quality, and how to write and publish academic work.
