Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption. Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing — the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects and spaces, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing materialities. The authors also aim to place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices.

This volume presents recent research on the relationship between the material format of text-bearing artefacts, the texts they carry, and their genre. The essays cover a vast period, from the counting stones of the late 4th millennium BCE to the time of the Great Hittite Kingdom in the 2nd millennium BCE. The breadth of substantive focus allows new insights of relevance to scholars in both Ancient Middle Eastern studies and the humanities.

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.

"Writing Training Materials that Work is a solid and practical resource to move our field to a more professional level of practice in which instructional decisions are based on research and valid models of how people learn" --Ruth Clark, president, Clark Training and Consulting, past president, ISPI "I can see how this book will be immediately useful to my students. In fact, I can see how it will be immediately useful to me. Thanks for putting it all together between two covers." --Allison Rossett, professor, San Diego State University The explosion of e-learning has attracted huge numbers of practitioners to the field of instructional design (ID), many with little or no actual ID training. And most current texts fail to cover the substantial recent developments in the field. Writing Training Materials that Work is different. In it, the authors identify, synthesize, and summarize the most current best practices in ID. They offer new ways of teaching declarative knowledge (facts, concepts, and principles) and well- to ill- structured procedural knowledge (problem solving). Their recommendations are based on those principles in the cognitive learning and instruction literature that are internally consistent, prescriptive, and have been empirically demonstrated to make a cost-effective difference. The authors' approach is easy to implement and consistently gets results because it focuses on teaching deep understanding and problem-solving, allowing learners to generalize and transfer learning to new situations without re-training. Whether you re an experienced instructional design practitioner who wants to expand your skills or a graduate student in an advanced instructional design course, Writing Training Materials T\that Work will prove to be a readable, usable, and indispensable guide!

This book focuses on the material practice of ancient literacy through a contextual examination of Roman writing equipment.

Ways of Writing is about the making of texts in seventeenth-century New England, whether they were fashioned into printed books or disseminated in handwritten form. David D. Hall explores issues of authority and authenticity, the roles of intermediaries, and the political and social contexts of publication, among other issues.

"This book is an indispensable resource." - Greg Wright, Kainos Software Ltd. Radically improve your testing practice and software quality with new testing styles, good patterns, and reliable automation. Key Features A practical and results-driven approach to unit testing Refine your existing unit tests by implementing modern best practices Learn the four pillars of a good unit test Safely automate your testing process to save time and money Spot which tests need refactoring, and which need to be deleted entirely Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About The Book Great testing practices maximize your project quality and delivery speed by identifying bad code early in the development process. Wrong tests will break your code, multiply bugs, and increase time and costs. You owe it to yourself—and your projects—to learn how to do excellent unit testing. Unit Testing Principles, Patterns and Practices teaches you to design and write tests that target key areas of your code including the domain model. In this clearly written guide, you learn to develop professional-quality tests and test suites and integrate testing throughout the application life cycle. As you adopt a testing mindset, you’ll be amazed at how better tests cause you to write better code. What You Will Learn Universal guidelines to assess any unit test Testing to identify and avoid anti-patterns Refactoring tests along with the production code Using integration tests to verify the whole system This Book Is Written For For readers who know the basics of unit testing. Examples are written in C# and can easily be applied to any language. About the Author Vladimir Khorikov is an author, blogger, and Microsoft MVP. He has mentored numerous teams on the ins and outs of unit testing. Table of Contents: PART 1 THE BIGGER PICTURE 1 ¦ The goal of unit testing 2 ¦ What is a unit test? 3 ¦ The anatomy of a unit test PART 2 MAKING YOUR TESTS WORK FOR YOU 4 ¦ The four pillars of a good unit test 5 ¦ Mocks and test fragility 6 ¦ Styles of unit testing 7 ¦ Refactoring toward valuable unit tests PART 3 INTEGRATION TESTING 8 ¦ Why integration testing? 9 ¦ Mocking best practices 10 ¦ Testing the database PART 4 UNIT TESTING ANTI-PATTERNS 11 ¦ Unit testing anti-patterns

Letter writing was widespread in the Graeco-Roman world, as indicated by the large number of surviving letters and their extensive coverage of all social categories. Despite a large amount of work that has been done on the topic of ancient epistolography, material and formatting conventions have remained underexplored, mainly due to the difficulty of accessing images of letters in the past. Thanks to the increasing availability of digital images and the appearance of more detailed and sophisticated editions, we are now in a position to study such aspects. This book examines the development of letter writing conventions from the archaic to Roman times, and is based on a wide corpus of letters that survive on their original material substrates. The bulk of the material is from Egypt, but the study takes account of comparative evidence from other regions of the Graeco-Roman world. Through analysis of developments in the use of letters, variations in formatting conventions, layout and authentication patterns according to the sociocultural background and communicational needs of writers, this book sheds light on changing trends in epistolary practice in Graeco-Roman society over a period of roughly eight hundred years. This book will appeal to scholars of Epistolography, Papyrology, Palaeography, Classics, Cultural History of the Graeco-Roman World.

Softbound - New, softbound print book.

This book, offered here in its first open-access edition, addresses a wide range of writing activites and genres, from summarizing and responding to sources to writing the research paper and writing about literature. This edition of the book has been adapted from the fifth edition, published in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin. Copyrighted materials--primarily examples within the text--have been removed from this edition.