Straightforward, practical, and focused on realistic examples, Business and Professional Writing: A Basic Guide for Americans is an introduction to the fundamentals of professional writing. The book emphasizes clarity, conciseness, and plain language. Guidelines and templates for business correspondence, formal and informal reports, brochures and press releases, and oral presentations are included. Exercises guide readers through the process of creating and revising each genre, and helpful tips, reminders, and suggested resources beyond the book are provided throughout.

This book gives students an answer to the question, “What does my professor want from this essay?” In lively, direct language, it explains the process of creating “a clearly-written argument, based on evidence, about the meaning, power, or structure of a literary work.” Using a single poem by William Carlos Williams as the basis for the process of writing a paper about a piece of literature, it walks students through the processes of reading, brainstorming, researching secondary sources, gathering evidence, and composing and editing the paper. Writing Essays About Literature is designed to strengthen argumentation skills and deepen understanding of the relationships between the reader, the author, the text, and critical interpretations. Its lessons about clarity, precision, and the importance of providing evidence will have wide relevance for student writers.

This is a book for real students, people with full and active lives. Academic Writing Now: A Brief Guide for Busy Students covers the basics of the introductory college writing course in a concise, student-friendly format. Each chapter concentrates on a crucial element of composing an academic essay and is capable of being read in a single sitting. The book also includes numerous “timesaver tips,” along with warnings about frequent student errors—all designed to help students make the most of one of their most limited and precious resources: time.

While students today have access to more sources of information than ever before, they are not necessarily equipped to make informed judgments about those sources. Teaching students to evaluate sources has become even more challenging in the last year, as issues regarding fake news and “alternative facts” have become a heated matter in conversations taking place in the public sphere. The book will present students with a set of tools that they can use to evaluate any source that they encounter. In addition to learning how to use sources in their writing, students who read Who’s Your Source? will become more savvy consumers of the sources they encounter in their daily lives.

This concise guidebook offers a rhetorical framework for writing and analyzing content for social media and the web. In the age of disinformation and hyper-targeted digital advertising, writers and teachers of writing must be prepared to delve into the digital world with a critical and strategic perspective. This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to writing scenarios, with insights from classical and contemporary rhetoric, the philosophy of technology, and digital media theory. Special emphases are also placed on preparing for writing, marketing, and communications careers in the digital space, and on ethical issues related to digital and social media.

In recent decades, the contested areas of English usage have grown both larger and more numerous. English speakers argue about whether we should say man or humanity, fisher or fisherman; whether we ought to speak of people as being disabled, or challenged, or differently abled; whether it is acceptable to say that’s so gay. More generally, we ask, can we use language in ways that avoid giving expression to prejudices embedded within it? Can the words we use help us point a way towards a better world? Can we ask such questions with appropriate seriousness while remaining open-minded—and while retaining our sense of humor? To all these questions this concise and user-friendly guide answers yes, while offering clear-headed discussions of many of the key issues.

Write Moves is an invitation for the student to understand and experience creative writing in the larger frame of humanities education. The practical instruction offered comes in the form of “moves” or tactics for the apprentice writer to try. But the title also speaks to a core value of this project: that creative writing exists to move us. The book focuses on concise, human-voiced instruction in poetry, the short story, and the short creative nonfiction essay. Emphasis on short forms allows the beginning student to appreciate lessons in craft without being overwhelmed by lengthy model texts; diverse examples of these genres are offered in the anthology.

Notable for its use of real document examples drawn from actual healthcare settings, in addition to its central section’s extended focus on narrative medicine and new media writing, Healthcare Writing: A Practical Guide to Professional Success provides a wide-ranging, much-needed contemporary perspective on the modes and contexts of writing most pertinent to today’s healthcare professionals. Aimed at students enrolled in university- or college-level healthcare programs, healthcare communication specialists, as well as at current clinical practitioners seeking a portable reference and guide, this book combines a detailed discussion of approaches to key healthcare document types—both professional and academic—with a thorough but accessible overview of essential points of grammar, punctuation, and style.

Book history has emerged in the last twenty years as one of the most important new fields of interdisciplinary study. It has produced new interpretations of major historical events, has made possible new approaches to history, literature, media, and culture, and presents a distinctive historical perspective on current debates about the future of the book. The Broadview Introduction to Book History provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to this field. Written in a lively, accessible style, chapters on materiality, textuality, printing and reading, intermediality, and remediation guide readers through numerous key concepts, illustrated with examples from literary texts and historical documents produced across a wide historical range. An ideal text for undergraduate and graduate courses in book history, it offers a road map to this dynamic inter-disciplinary field.

Considering the composition classroom as a mad scientist’s laboratory, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition introduces different kinds of writing as experiments. Writing an essay is a task that can strike fear into a student’s heart, but performing an experiment licenses creativity and doesn’t presume that one knows the outcome from the start. The Mad Scientist’s Guide covers the kinds of writing most often required on college campuses, while also addressing important steps and activities frequently overlooked in composition guides, such as revision and peer reviewing. Actual examples of student writing are included throughout, as are helpful reminders and tips to help students polish their skills. Above all, the Mad Scientist’s Guide seeks to make writing fun.