The St. Martin's Guide to Writ

Whether you have years of experience as a teacher or are new to the classroom, you and your students can count on The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing to provide the support you need in first-year composition, with a rhetoric, an array of engaging readings, a research manual, and a handbook, all in a single book — and available online. Thousands of instructors and their students rely on the Guide’s proven approach because it works: the Guide’s acclaimed step-by-step writing guides to 9 different genres offer sure-fire invention strategies to get students started, sentence strategies to get students writing, and thoughtful revision strategies to help students make their writing their own, no matter what their major. With its hands-on activities for reading like a writer and working with sources, there is no better text to help students bridge reading analytically to successful writing in first-year composition and beyond.

In keeping with the Guide’s tradition of innovation and based on instructor feedback about what assignments they give their students, the new edition integrates new types of writing that reflect the range of genres being assigned in first-year composition, including a reimagined Chapter 5 that provides a bridge from personal and expository to argumentative writing by following a scaffolded approach. 

The eleventh edition is available with LaunchPad for The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, an online course space of pre-built units featuring the full e-book, tutorials, and adaptive LearningCurve activities to help students hone their understanding of reading and writing.  To order or purchase the print text with LaunchPad, use ISBN 9781457698484 for the Cloth-bound version, ISBN 9781319016036 for the Paper-bound version, or ISBN 9781319016067 for the Short Edition.

Rise B. Axelrod is McSweeney Professor of Rhetoric and Teaching Excellence, Emeritus, at the University of California, Riverside, where she was also director of English Composition. She has previously been professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino; director of the College Expository Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and assistant director of the Third College (now Thurgood Marshall College) Composition Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is the co-author, with Charles R. Cooper, of the best-selling textbook The St. Martin's Guide to Writing as well as The Concise Guide to Writing and Reading Critically, Writing Well.

Charles R. Cooper is an emeritus professor at the University of California, San Diego. He served as coordinator of the Third College (now Thurgood Marshall College) Composition Program at the University of California, San Diego, and co-director of the San Diego Writing Project, one of the National Writing Project Centers. He advised the National Assessment of Educational Progress Writing (1973-1981) and coordinated the development of California's first statewide writing assessment (1986-1991). He taught at the University of California, Riverside; the State University of New York at Buffalo; and the University of California, San Diego. He is co-editor, with Lee Odell, of Evaluating Writing and Research on Composing: Points of Departure, and he is co-author, with Rise Axelrod, of the best-selling textbook The St. Martin's Guide to Writing as well as The Concise Guide to Writing and Reading Critically, Writing Well."