A Student Guide to College Composition

This book helps students succeed in composition by showing them: How to be effective students How to handle the most difficult challenges of academic writing How to approach the most common writing assignments. How to pass a timed writing test William Murdick has a Ph. D. in rhetoric and is the author of three other writing textbooks, The Portable Business Writer (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and The Portable Technical Writer (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), and College Writing: A First Course - Writing and Reasoning (Jain, 2006).Note on the Second Edition: This expanded Second Edition includes full-chapter treatments of the five-paragraph theme and the cause-effect essay.

A Student Guide to College Composition is meant to serve as a conventional textbook, though it can also be used by students independently to help them do well in composition.

Part I: Succeeding in Composition describes teacher expectations in various models of the composition course. It then elaborates on nineteen do's and don'ts (attend class; understand assignments, turn in neat copy, etc.). The premise is that most student failure in composition results from ineffective behavior, not hopelessly poor writing ability.

Part II: Meeting the Challenges of Academic Writing looks in detail at three of the most difficult and important challenges of academic writing: full development of points, educated adult reasoning, and the incorporation of outside sources.

Part III: Handling the Major Assignments shows students how to create a well-developed first draft of the five most common writing assignments: the personal narrative, the informative article, the argument on a controversial issue, the literary criticism paper, and the long research paper.