Purpose and Process : A Reader for Writers (2000, Paperback)

This innovative reader focuses on writers' purposes and processes for reading and writing, and on the connections between reading and writing. Organized around purposes for writing, it outlines practical guidelines and strategies for achieving specific writing goals. Sixty-four selections by both professional and student writers illustrate these strategies. A diverse group of mainstream and minority professional writers includes works by such authors as Annie Dillard, Peter Elbow, Paule Marshall, Kirsten Cole, John Leonard, Stephen Perrine, and Deborah Tannen. Topics of contemporary issues covered are Generation X, Barbie dolls, the Internet, New Age medicine, fat free foods, current films, and talk shows. For anyone who wants to improve and take control of their reading and writing.

Encouraging writers to take control of their reading and writing, Purpose and Process, Fourth Edition:

• Features introductory chapters on reading and writing that introduce students to critical reading and to the various purposes and processes for writing.
• Focuses on basic stages or dimensions, including collecting, shaping, drafting, and revising, and illustrates the individual processes of nine student writers.
• Organizes coverage by writing purposes, requiring students to observe, remember, investigate, explain, evaluate, solve a problem, or argue a subject for a specific audience in a defined context.
• Provides a full range of essays—20 new to this edition—that feature mainstream and minority authors, multicultural perspectives, and a variety of topics, writing levels, and styles.

In addition, a sequenced set of questions about each essay reinforces the reading/writing goals: Questions on Meaning, Questions on Purpose and Strategy, Questions on Audience and Language, and Questions for Discussion and Writing.