Steps in Composition (8th Edition)

This eighth edition of Steps in Compositioncontinues to reflect our conviction that writing is a lively, engaging activity that helps students to fulfill their personal and professional goals. Our approach to teaching writing is both practical and pedagogically sound. To encourage student success, we use a number of essential elements: Engaging visuals elicit responses as each chapter begins. Contemporary, thought-provoking reading selections on the same theme as the visuals stimulate critical thinking and promote effective reading skills. Comprehensive discussions of rhetoric, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary building, and spelling provide jargon-free explanations and clear examples. Frequent Try It Out mini-exercises throughout the instructional material help students to reinforce their learning as they go along. Exercises are sequenced from basic practice to participatory applications, a research-based progression that transfers well to actual writing. Informative, entertaining exercise content includes news items with universal themes and fascinating facts to keep student interest high. Numerous charts help students use the text as an out-of-class reference tool. Extensive lists of topics for writing both paragraphs and essays stimulate student writing on a variety of contemporary issues. To ensure that Steps in Compositionremains both current and comprehensive, this eighth edition has been expanded to include thirteen chapters and several new features: Chapters 12 and 13 contain detailed information on all nine major patterns of essay development: description, narration, exemplification, process, comparison/contrast, classification, cause/effect, definition, and argumentation. Each rhetorical mode is illustrated with three model essays and is supported by guided writing exercises that give students the opportunity to reinforce learning. Five of the thirteen essays are new and are accompanied by new Reading Survey questions and vocabulary materials. The new design enhances the text's usefulness as a reference tool. The pages in all grammar and rhetoric sections are bordered in blue, to help students find these important materials in a chapter. In addition, a boldface heading now introduces each grammar rule or rhetorical concept, making it easier for students to retrieve information on a page. We retain the features added to our previous revisions and continue to use the same chapter organization and instructional framework, one that offers an integration of writing instruction with reading, vocabulary building, and spelling. All thirteen chapters feature: SPRINGBOARDS TO THINKING.Photographs, cartoons, graphs, advertisements, and an artwork--accompanied by stimulating questions-- get students' thinking started on a contemporary issue that forms each chapter's theme. In this edition, themes range from road rage to race relations, from gender issues to troubled families. ESSAY.Lively discussions of thought-provoking topics focus on each chapter's theme. Several new essays are included together with some of our favorites from the previous edition. Among the authors represented in this eighth edition are Dave Barry, Ellen Goodman, Alice Walker, Martin Gottfried, Anna Quindlen, and Wally Lamb. READING SURVEY.Questions center on main ideas, major details, inferences, and opinions. This sequence is designed to move students toward critical reading skills by leading them from literal meaning to inferential reasoning to evaluative thinking. VOCABULARY BUILDING.Words from each chapter's essay are clustered around each chapter's theme. In this eighth edition, students learn and practice, for example, the vocabulary of self-image, of today's adolescent subculture, of a violent society. Simple, fuLynn Quitman Troyka is the author of 'Steps in Composition (8th Edition)', published 2003 under ISBN 9780131100695 and ISBN 0131100696.