post test reading and writing about essays

The Word on College Reading and Writing

(34 reviews)

Monique Babin

Carol Burnell, Clackamas Community College

Susan Pesznecker, Clackamas Community College

Nicole Rosevear, Clackamas Community College

Jaime Wood, Portland State University

Publisher: Open Oregon Educational Resources

Language: English

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Reviewed by Lisa Parra, Professor of Reading, Johnson County Community College on 5/13/22

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

This text offers a wide variety of strategies in reading and writing that would be appropriate for introductory college students and for the high school level. The portion on reading, in particular, does a nice job explaining the task of a college-level reader as well as how to improve skills to become a better reader. The writing part is robust with exercises, and resources provided.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The content is accurate and related to common practices in teaching reading and writing strategies. The material is current and includes research-based information.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The content is current and reflects relevant and engaging topics. The material could easily be updated in the future if needed to be more up to date. The strategies presented are research-based in the fields of reading and writing.

Clarity rating: 5

The writing style is easy to understand, and engaging. The message is straightforward and clear, as is the organization of the information. Students will be able to easily navigate the text.

Consistency rating: 4

The voice, tone, and flow of the text are consistent from section to section. There is a conversational tone that would be appealing to learners. The reading portion doesn’t seem quite as developed as the writing, and this is something that could be improved upon.

Modularity rating: 5

Sections in this book could be used in their entirety, or selectively depending on the needs of the students or the course focus. The organization of the text offers an easy way to excerpt the content for use. While concepts can build on one another, as the introduction pointed out, you can skip around and explore the material out of order.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The organization and flow of the book are logical and there are many skill-building opportunities throughout the book. The assignments can be used in the order best suited for the class taught and do not necessarily have to be completed consecutively. The organization is in two parts, beginning with reading strategies and concluding with the writing process.

Interface rating: 5

Accessing the online version of the text worked well from my computer. I also was easily able to download the ebook digital PDF and would imagine printing if needed would be simple. As far as viewing the book on a smartphone, navigating the online version worked well.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

There were no grammatical errors noted.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

This content is inclusive, especially regarding gender/gender-neutral references. The text does not necessarily include many multi-cultural aspects as it seems more generic in scope. I did not discover any measures of cultural insensitivity or offensiveness; however, the cultural relevance could be improved.

Reviewed by Christine Wittmer, Learning Specialist, University of Southern Indiana on 4/28/22

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

I teach Academic Reading Strategies and I couldn’t find a text from the list that would be a good substitute to the course’s learning objectives. The book I chose to review was written in two halves, one on reading and one on writing. The reading section was a little sparse and general. There were not a lot of practices which I think is helpful for a textbook. The section on Informational Literacy was more developed. It had a few practices and ideas for discussion in the classroom. It was very straight-forward and easy to understand which most students would appreciate. The writing section of the text was even more developed with more direction and practices. For writing textbook, I feel that the text was very comprehensive, but since I am looking for an academic reading text, it was lacking. The table of contents was accurate and effective. The glossary was brief, but it included ideas covered in the text.

The material was accurate and error-free. I saw no author bias.

The The material was relevant. It referred to current ideas and developments, but I think the ideas would not be outdated very soon. There was a reference to a student's MP3 player which I think my students would find humorous, but I don't think it distracts from the message of the text. I would think it would be easy to update anything that might be "dated" or obsolete in the future.

Clarity rating: 4

The text had a very conversational flow. It was written in first person and very informal. It sounded as if the author was speaking directly to the reader. I felt it was a little choppy in sections with not much development of ideas. This criticism of the underdeveloped ideas focuses much more on the first half of the text than the second half. This is clearly a writing textbook and the reading aspect of it seems "extra".

Consistency rating: 5

The book is highly consistent in tone, structure and organization.

Modularity rating: 4

The text is divisible into smaller reading sections. The first half of the book that discussed reading was shorter in general than most of the sections in the writing portion of the text. None of the sections were overwhelmingly long or contained so many links that it proved distracting. Although almost every section had one of two links within it, it was not distracting or confusing. Clicking on a link was not essential for understanding the text.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The table of contents was organized well with one topic flowing logically to the next one. The sentences and paragraphs were also organized in a logical and clear fashion. I didn't like the fact that after a "Check Your Understanding", the student needed to click to the "answer page". It disrupts the flow of the reading in my opinion.

I reviewed the book online and had no issues with navigation.

I found no grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The text is not culturally insensitive in any way. Most of the book is written in first and second person, so there is not an abundance of opportunity for a variety of example of cultural inclusiveness. In one exercise, there are eight people. Within that grouping there are a variety of races, cultures, and sexual orientations. The text contains a variety of pronoun usage including "they" for a singular pronoun.

The book would be a good addition to the course that I am teaching, but it would not serve as the one text for the course. This book is designed for a writing course and not a reading course so it is understandable that it is lacking in many areas that my students would need in a textbook.

Reviewed by Nick Mancini, Assistant Professor of Reading, Johnson County Community College on 4/25/22

Generally comprehensive as an INTRODUCTION to high-level reading and writing. I think this could be used for late high school too. While the brevity and conciseness is overall a positive for a text like this, there are a few sections that... read more

Generally comprehensive as an INTRODUCTION to high-level reading and writing. I think this could be used for late high school too.

While the brevity and conciseness is overall a positive for a text like this, there are a few sections that seem to be too short and would need some outside sources to supplement this text.

As a stand-alone textbook, I'm not sure this text would be quite robust enough, but as a reference material included in a course, this text would be quite valuable.

The content is research-based and accurate to my knowledge of best practices.

In addition to accuracy, the content draws upon recent research in both writing and reading. The text is organized in an effective way that will be easily updateable as new research surfaces.

The text is written in a clear, straightforward way, mixing informal and formal prose effectively. Some parts are very "conversational" and will likely be easily readable by students, even those in developmental courses. The actual strategies are then presented in clear, objective, matter-of-fact tones that provide actionable activities which students can implement in their course(s).

Additionally, there are many "checks for understanding" wherein students can practice the strategies with real texts. The chosen texts/activities are good overall.

While still well done, the textbook does suffer slightly from some sections being overly brief, both in general and when compared to other sections of the textbook.

The textbook could easily be used as a reference material wherein the instructor picks and chooses specific sections of the text to present/assign. In fact, I think that is how this textbook would most shine.

The text is not overly self-referential, and when it is self-referential, the text provides links to the referenced section. An instructor could easily use parts of the text in any order throughout the course.

The text presents the reading and writing process in a research-backed way that I believe students would find easy to understand and implement into practice.

I did not find any interface or navigation issues with this text. In general, the interface is intuitive and easy to use.

No found grammatical errors.

While the text is not culturally insensitive, I wouldn't call it particularly culturally sensitive. This text seems applicable to many settings and learners and doesn't seem to suffer from a particular bias; however, there doesn't seem to be a concerted effort to include texts that would meet a DEI committee's standards. There are opportunities to include more DEI texts as "checks for understanding." [DEI = Diversity, Equity, Inclusion]

Overall, I would consider this text to be a wonderful resource for students. It is generally easy to read and presents the research in non-technical/jargon ways that students will be likely to understand. Overall, 4.75+/5. It's not perfect, but it's great for what it is -- a small resource/skills/reference text.

Some sections seem to be a little short to stand alone, and the text could benefit from more checks for understanding (and more diverse readings/texts/activities in the checks for understanding).

I'm not sure the text is robust enough to be a stand-alone textbook that would be used for a 3-credit hour course, but it would be a fantastic resource for alternate explanations or using sections of the text in addition to instructor materials. This text could easily serve as a jumping-off point for developing a course.

Personally, there are several sections that I will use as a supplement to my already existing lectures/materials (and/or replacements for other texts I've used). There are several other sections I will provide to students as optional extra help/alternative explanations/possible extra credit for the checks for understanding etc.

Reviewed by Olga Gould, Assistant Professor Reading/Literacy, Eastern New Mexico University on 1/1/22, updated 4/22/24

It needs to be stated up front that this book is easy to comprehend. In its Introduction section, the authors explain how to use this text and for who it was meant. The book is divided into multiple chapters/sections each of which has a self-explanatory title or heading. Importantly, the language of this publication targets college students, while the content of each chapter or section sounds as an advice to higher education learners. Oftentimes, this advice is provided as a step-by-step guidance in a numbered or bulleted order, which should facilitate better meaning-making and memorization of the read texts by the readers. Another beneficial feature of this book, which most likely will make this reading easily understandable is the Problem and Suggestions structure. Struggling readers might locate the issues they encounter in their own reading and writing practices and see the suggested solutions which they may try to implement in order to resolve their literacy problems. Addition of the above Problem and Suggestion sections might allow students to strongly relate to the contents of this book. Thus, their comprehension of this reading can become higher through the deeper personal interest and engagement.

Notably, the content of this publication is unbiased. The authors provide a lot of practical advice in a non-invasive manner. The authors suggest how and in what ways students might practice, so they improve their reading and writing skills. This book offers its readers to consider some strategies, which were found helpful and useful through research and best teaching practices. Amazingly, the authors do not prompt nor insist on implementing the literacy strategies; instead, their language is highly suggestive by nature. Yet, the content of their advice and suggestions is very accurate due to the fact that the writing by Babin et al. (2017) is based on the previously conducted research and publications in the field of reading and writing (See the list of works cited in Babin et al., 2017, pp. 220-221)

As for the relevance of this publication to the current chronotope, the content of this book is and will remain relevant to the needs and struggles of many college students, including but not limited to the learner populations with the previous histories of instructional deficiency in the areas of reading and writing. Additionally, this publication may be highly useful for International students in the American colleges and universities as well as for the domestic English as an Additional Language speakers for whom the English Language is not the one spoken in their homes. Moreover, the first generation in college type of American student populations might also find the content of this book extremely helpful due to the fact that this type of practical advice is least likely available to them in their homes. Furthermore, the students from the schools located in low socioeconomic status neighborhoods and learners from some poor quality schools may also strongly benefit from the advice and suggestions provided by the authors of this publication.

It needs to be noticed that the language of Babin et al.'s (2017) text is very clear and comprehensible. In addition to the simple wording of their ideas, the authors put their strong effort in creating a highly student-friendly structure of their book. This publication consists of sections, which are easy to locate using the table of contents and the pagination feature. Another helpful to the struggling readers factor is that each section is quite brief, though detailed. All headings in this book are printed in a significantly larger font, which adds to clarity of the entire writing and each part of it. Additionally, many chapters or sections contain examples. So, the strategies are not only theoretically described and explained but are also accompanied with some writing samples, which present an illustration or demonstration of how to write, or proofread, or cite, or edit, etc. For the readers who lack the knowledge of the specific vocabulary used in the fields of Reading and Writing, there is a glossary, which explains the terminology used in this book in the forms of definitions or paraphrased examples. All of the above adds to clarity and ease of understanding of the read ideas.

Importantly, the text of this publication is highly consistent in terms of its framework and terminology. Readers may choose to attend only to the topics of their high interest or engage in a linear reading, i.e., starting from the cover page and all the way through the entire book and its appendices section. Thanks to the consistency of this text's structure, its language, and ease of locating, reading, and understanding the used terminology, readers might find any of the above ways to read this book useful and helpful. Using the paginated table of contents, some readers might choose to start reading this book from the glossary and then, proceed with the linear reading and studies, or selective reading of those portions of this publication, which address the topics of each student's highest need or interest. The highly consistent framework of this text makes this book easy to use even for a novice student.

Talking about modularity of Babin et al.'s (2017) book, it needs to be recognized that it is one of the most efficient features of this publication. Its sections are not long, while each of them has a title (and subtitle) or a heading (and subheading), which makes this study guide highly usable and user-friendly. This book might be highly appealing for educators teaching First Year Seminars and College Literacy classes where the students are not very skilled at reading extensive texts rich in dense academic content. This text by Babin et al. (2017) is loaded with information; yet, it is very well-organized in short sections each of which provides to-the-point content in accordance with its heading. This modularity and brief but exact and detailed content of each chapter/section may be highly useful to the struggling readers and writers in college classrooms. Importantly, this book’s clear and concise structure will hardly exhaust even an unskilled reader. Significantly, this type of modularity might be highly beneficial for special education learners in colleges, for students with attention span problems, for English as an Additional Language learners, and low-proficient readers. This book is very efficiently and skillfully divided in multiple units and subunits, which are extremely easy to locate. Every particular reader can organize his or her own program or plan of reading or studying the content of this book starting off the units of their highest necessity and, further on, proceeding with the second- and third-interest or preference topics.

Prior to reading this book, students might choose or be directed to go through its table of contents. The topics discussed in this publication are presented in a very clear and logical fashion. Babin et al. (2017) start their book with their advice on how to become an efficient reader. These authors create a welcoming reading environment and proceed with their tips on how to utilize the most effecient reading strategies, such as taking notes, engaging in some kind of a dialogue with the text or its author(s), going further and researching the topic, questioning self and thinking critically, developing one's own point of view, and learning to summarize, analyze, and synthesize the text. The above structure strongly correlates with the structure of a conventional English Language Arts program. Yet, its major strength is in the very brief and concise delivery of each topic, where each of them is understandable for any level educator and, first and foremost, for practically any student.

Following the above, the second part of this book teaches college students how to write. The students with the previous instructional deficiency will learn to set a purpose for writing, identify the audience, and select a point of view or perspective from which they will address the topic of their essay or research paper. This book is highly inclusive for those unskilled writers who, generally, do not know how to start writing and struggle to come out with the idea “what to start with.” In response to the common needs of the struggling beginning or emergent writers, the authors of this book provide a very rich advice on how to narrow the topic. Further on, they offer some strategies on how writers might begin introducing and developing their selected topics. Yet, writing and submitting the work straight away might not be the best practice, as advised by the authors of this book. They teach beginning writers to develop several drafts, while proofreading, editing, and enriching their writings in several steps prior to submission for grading or peer review. There is also a section of writing academic research report papers in specific formats with detailed explanations on how to credit the used sources. All of the above is organized in a highly clear and logical fashion, starting from "how to begin" and ending with "how to polish" the seemingly ready product.

In terms of the technical details, this text does not have any significant interface issues. Due to its clear organization, the book is easy to navigate. Unlike the publications offered online for kindle, this book is paginated and has a very clear table of contents. All the chapters and sections can be easily located. There are no features, which might distract or confuse readers. The clarity and quality of the interface are some of the best features of this book.

Babin et al.’s (2017) book has no grammatical errors. Generally, the quality of grammar in a publication is highly important for the students who are working towards improvement of their own writing skills. Many learners take the grammatical structures, punctuation, and spelling in the college books and course study guides as an example to follow. Diligent students put a strong effort in memorization of the grammatical structures they encounter in their college course readings. Oftentimes, students support their writing with the texts they read. Some learners would bring the texts with them to their classes to demonstrate to their professors where exactly they found some specific rule, or which exactly portions of texts they used as a model for their own writing. The book by Babin et al. is a great study guide to use in one's college classroom without having to apologize in front of the students, saying that “typos may happen to everyone."

Culture-wise, the book by Babin et al. (2017) is highly diversity-inclusive. The authors target wide student audiences without discriminating them on any cultural, racial, ethnic, or other backgrounds. In these terms, the language of the book is neutral, highly inclusive, and welcoming. The focus on the reading and writing improvement without distractions on any extraneous topics makes this book highly usable for all kinds of readers, including both: students and their educators. Due to this high focus on the "business" and exclusively "shop talk," this publication may be used nationwide in the United States, regardless of the cultural, racial, or ethnic breakdown of each specific school or region. This book may be found invaluable overseas for teaching wide international student populations in colleges or college preparatory classes worldwide. Though this book is written in the English language, its content might be equally useful to speakers, readers, and writers of other languages. So, this publication may be utilized in learning how to efficiently read and skillfully write not only in the English language but in any other languages. The latter is one of the highest values of this publication.

As a university Reading and Literacy professor, I am planning to use this book in my classrooms. I would highly recommend this publication for my colleagues who are teaching reading, writing, and literacy skills in any subject area or field. This book may be useful and helpful in the College Literacy and First Year Seminar classrooms. Nevertheless, some of the second, third, or later years’ students may gain more of useful college reading and writing skills thanks to this publication. Thus, the book by Babin et al. (2017) may be considered a “must have” by the caring educators who are willing to help their students to master the college reading and writing skills and advance in their academics.

Gould-Yakovleva, O. (2022). The sought resources for my students: A book review by a university professor. [Review of the book The word on college reading and writing, by M. Babin, C. Burnell, S. Pesznecker, N. Rosevear, & J. Wood]. Open Educational Resources. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10969437

Reviewed by Christopher Zimmerly-Beck, Associate Faculty, Clackamas Community College on 11/15/21

The material in this textbook is an excellent tool for helping students meet the learning outcomes of an introductory composition course, i.e., WR121. The book covers everything from building strong literacy skills to engaging with texts to crafting well-written, concise academic work. The material is organized well (I primarily used the online version). It offers a complete glossary and appendices which cover questions of style, formatting, and more. The text's Works Cited is robust, error-free, and a great resource in its own right.

The textbook material is presented accurately and with no noticeable errors. Content is delivered well in ways that are accessible to students taking college composition courses.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

The material is still relevant. The section which covers citing sources utilizes MLA8, which came out in 2016. in 2021 MLA9 was released. The minor tweaks MLA9 has made to formatting guidelines are not a large enough of an issue for this textbook to not be a worthwhile resource to a composition course.

The text is very clear. The writing is concise and complicated terms and concepts are properly contextualized.

The text is highly consistent. The content from one section builds toward the next while still allowing educators and students to engage with the text flexibly. That is, you could teach this book from cover to cover or only integrate specific sections into a course without losing any value of the text.

This text is incredibly modular. It's authors describe the material as being organized in such a way that users can "use it as you need it." After reading through the material they have done a really great job organizing information so it can be engaged with in small well organized pieces or as a whole.

The work is organized quite well. The topics covered are straightforward and concise.

Navigating through the online version of the textbook was quite seamless. There were no broken links, images and charts all appeared formatted correctly and with professional and aesthetically consistency.

Since this book is a composition textbook, it would be pretty appalling if it contained grammatical errors. Thankfully, this textbook was free of errors.

One of my favorite parts of this book is the writer's commitment to using gender-inclusive language. This book is culturally informed and respects the diversity of students' backgrounds and identities.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Breitenfeldt, Associate Professor, Roxbury Community College on 6/28/21

This text covers a wide range of skills for writing--from advice crafting titles to managing anxiety/writer's block to rhetorical tools like audience/purpose and even instruction on information literacy. However, one of its best and more unique aspects is the effective integration of reading and writing that matches well with attempts to accelerate remedial course sequences. Not only that, the companion materials include sample syllabi, assignments, handouts/readings, and links to instructional resources that simplify adoption in many different courses.

I noticed no issues with accuracy, and the text seemed error-free. This includes links to MLA resources which are both active and updated to reflect recent changes in the 9th edition--something most print textbooks struggle to accomplish.

This text seems carefully constructed to avoid dated references (except, perhaps, the mention of MP3 players), and links to external materials seem more stable than many OER texts. Another benefit is that mentions of college don't seem limited to four-year universities which could make this text feel more relevant to students attending a community college.

The use of questions to present information, the well-structured headings or sections within chapters, and the helpful examples when a concept might be unfamiliar, are very effective ways this text works to improve clarity.

The more complex terms and frameworks, specifically the focus on audience, purpose, and tone, are used consistently throughout the text.

While the text is divided effectively into sections that would be easy to assign as needed, some are overly short and require supplementation in order to fully explore the topic. This issue is somewhat common in OER texts, however, and many instructors already have strategies to create cohesive reading assignments using several shorter texts.

Even though beginning the text with a focus on reading makes sense since it would help students complete further assigned reading in the course, it would be helpful to more fully integrate reading skills into other chapters as well. It can be tricky to suggest that a few short chapters early in the semester are enough work to change or develop good reading habits.

This text uses a familiar Pressbooks format that many instructors (and students) will find familiar and highly usable even on phones and tablets or with limited internet access.

The text contains no grammatical errors, which is helpful for maintaining credibility.

While the text doesn't seem culturally insensitive, there could be a more inclusive range of examples used to better connect with diverse student populations.

This is an excellent text, specifically for an accelerated remedial course using an integrated reading and writing framework. It covers more areas of college writing with a clear rhetorical framework than many similar options, and it's easily accessible by a wide range of students.

Reviewed by L Boyd, English faculty, Portland Community College on 6/14/21

An ambitious undertaking, this text covers reading, information literacy, and writing processes independently and as integrated components of college learning. The authors connect with students in an accessible, friendly tone and with relevant... read more

To address comprehensiveness, though, there are some inconsistencies: Part 2: Writing is extremely thorough, leaving me to wonder if Part 1 might be more well developed and if Information Literacy might deserve its own part.

The Dealing With Obstacles section is a special gem that address some vexing but real challenges students will likely encounter, and the Appendices cover the handbook material every good textbook needs.

The content reflects current practices and thinking in reading, writing, and information literacy. The examples provided are directly related to helping students develop concrete skills with each part of these processes. Students might benefit from some exposure to the disciplinary vocabulary of reading (e.g. schema, metacognition) as is provided in the writing and information literacy sections.

The foundational concepts are current and well developed, and the majority of examples carry across time. Most linked articles were published in 2016, so they are becoming dated. It's clear by the topic choice that they were selected to have some longevity and may be easily supplemented or updated. The biggest challenge students may encounter is lack of access to the actual articles because many sources require subscriptions. It may be worth connecting this to the information literacy component and advocating for use of library databases for access.

Students will find the approachable language easy to access and understand. Any technical terms used are provided with a reasonable explanation, examples, and/or a pronunciation guide so students not only recognize them but can also incorporate them into their own vocabulary. The glossary is useful, though it's not clear why some words were included and others that had been defined similarly in the text were not.

The format and framework of this text are very consistent. It's easy to orient to and follows a clear pattern. I find that its inconsistency lies in the coverage of each content section: Building Strong Reading Skills includes many very brief, bullet pointed sections with relatively few in-depth examples; Information Literacy has fewer sections but extensive blocks of information; and Writing has in-depth coverage and examples of each part of the process. In short, it's unbalanced, so it feels inconsistent if taken as a whole (see note on modularity below, however).

The adaptability of this text is one of its strengths for sure. It's equally easy to use the entire text, a section, or a subsection to focus on a specific skill or strategy with examples or to guide through a full process. Students who've been directed to one section may even find themselves exploring more using the well organized and clear table of contents.

Each section is clearly and logically organized to represent a process in itself, but when combined as a whole, the text reflects a larger process that engages students in the true integration of college level reading and writing.

There is some repetition that is noticeable when the text is used as a whole, however. For example, summary is addressed just briefly in the Writing About Texts section and again extensively in Drafting. It's unclear how or why the Writing About Texts section should be differentiated from the more general Writing section, though this could be a benefit in a more modular usage.

Everything seems to work well through navigation and links.

No errors noted.

The authors include thoughtful approaches to gendered and gender-neutral pronouns. I appreciated that when there was an example using highlighting to illustrate a color-coding approach to reading, they acknowledged that some may have challenges with seeing color, so they described the purpose and strategy with words. As an instructor with many student with learning differences, the inclusion of video, illustration (example: point of view), and other modalities is useful.

I started by using this text modularly to supplement other materials but may use it in its entirety to provide more consistency for students. It will be easy to adapt some of my own materials and still rely on this text. I appreciate how the authors engage a wide variety of potential first year students with their unique experiences and approaches to learning.

Reviewed by Riley McGuire, Assistant Professor, Worcester State University on 6/7/21

The authors do an excellent job covering the central elements of their ambitious dual foci on college reading and writing. I appreciate the textbook’s elucidation of the generative feedback loop between strong critical reading skills and the ability to craft compelling writing. To me, there are no glaring omissions in terms of content. Everything I would expect to find is present as well as some welcome bonuses; for instance, the advice on working through writer’s block and writing anxiety would be appreciated by many students. The section on Information Literacy is particularly effective.

My main critique is that the textbook would benefit from being more multidisciplinary in its examples and frameworks. College writing courses are required for all students at my institution, regardless of major, but the majority of examples here—particularly in the Reading sections—skew toward a literary focus. Even when the authors state that third-person POV characterizes “Much college, research, and professional writing,” the example they provide is from a novel (39-40). Similarly, the reading methodology of digging for meanings like “buried treasure” is less applicable to, say, a straightforward chemistry article than a modernist poem, whereas the advice that “the more current the date” on a source “the better” may be less applicable to a field like history (59). More disciplinary variety throughout the textbook would keep it dynamic and useful for all students.

On a macro-level the text ticks all of the boxes; however, in some micro-sections, more detail would be enriching. The section on sentence-level analysis tells readers to “Begin by considering the sentence length” (36), but that’s ultimately the end of the strategies offered. In a comparable way, the section on examining word choice focuses on the simplicity or complexity of diction, leaving out important stylistic choices including the use of figurative or symbolic language.

Lastly, a comprehensive index would be a beneficial addition.

The textbook offers a wealth of insight and information to allow students to excel at reading and writing at the college level. The advice is supported with illustrative examples and I was not struck by any major issues of inaccuracy or bias.

The only content error I encountered that would be confusing to students is when a dependent clause was defined as “an independent clause” (202)—a simple fix.

The textbook is current and relevant to college students today. Updating content—whether citation guidelines given the recently released MLA Handbook (9th Edition), or text examples, like The Hunger Games or Hamilton, that may have waning cultural recognizability in the years to come—should be a straightforward undertaking.

The authors have excelled in making a textbook that is useful and accessible to a wide range of readers. The tone is very friendly and inclusive and definitions for key terms are clear. The textbook makes frequent and effective use of a question-and-answer format and the authors’ ventriloquizing of student concerns not only validates how these aspects of reading and writing can be challenging, but also provides straightforward advice for how to navigate these issues. In addition, the included exercises are simple while remaining engaging and instructive.

The textbook is incredibly consistent throughout: it is apparent that the authors thought carefully about how to make the various sections work well together as a cohesive whole.

This is a real strength of the textbook! It is presented in short, digestible, and clearly sign-posted sections that could be assigned to students in the order they appear or in various other combinations. I believe it would work well as a central or a supplementary text alongside other germane material and that it would be useful to instructors and students alike, either in its entirety or in curated excerpts.

The textbook is very user-friendly, progressing from topic to topic in a sensible order, while also—as I’ve noted above—allowing for the possibility of reorganizing the sections for your own purposes. The authors include helpful references to other sections in the textbook, moving both backward and forward, to provide an ongoing set of navigational tools to complement the table of contents. My only minor qualm is that while I like the “several subsections as opposed to a few lengthy chapters” approach, I would still appreciate having those subsections numbered (1, 2, 2.1, 2.2, 3, etc.) This would make assigning sections of the text simpler.

Interface rating: 4

The web version seems excellent in this regard, though I was primarily reading the PDF. The PDF version is easy to navigate as a whole, but there are a few small interface issues, including images that overlap with text making the latter difficult to read at times, as well as a few broken links.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

The vast majority of the text is free of distracting errors, grammatical or otherwise. A few errors are present—minor typographical mistakes in the glossary; missing spaces; repeated words; the same sentence printed twice in close proximity (137); “archieve” instead of “archive”; “Sparks Notes” instead of “SparkNotes”; etc.—but these are sparse and do not distract from the clarity of the content.

The textbook is not insensitive or offensive and does include some diverse examples, including references to a range of non-heterosexual romantic relationships. However, many of the literary examples skew white and Western in terms of their authorship and content and more racial diversity in examples, as well as references to other socially marginalized experiences such as disability, would be beneficial. This textbook could easily be paired with an instructor’s own complementary readings, though, so this does not invalidate its utility.

Overall, The Word on College Reading and Writing is an engaging and admirable offering that deserves consideration by any writing instructor looking for a great OER option to adopt in their courses.

Reviewed by Laura Schlegel, Faculty, Holyoke Community College on 6/1/21

The book is great at starting before the beginning. I like that the authors start with what it means to be a college student reading college texts and the checklists for students. Going into how to be a good reader is often overlooked in first year composition and this book takes a good look at this. The chapters are easy to follow and flow in a way that helps students from beginning to end.

I found the book to be very accurate and modern in the way the authors have discussed ways of reading and writing. The beginning description of gender and gender-neutral language helps students in todays classroom. This also helps in communicating my own belief in the safe classroom that allows for all people to learn in a safe environment.

The book is very orderly in the way it is written and arranged. If there are future updates this could be done with ease without making the book lose its flow and organization. The chapters are done in a way that would make it easy to add or subtract if needed.

This book was very clear for students, especially if I were to use in a developmental English class. The ease of understanding the points and the "check your understanding" areas will be an incredible help to students who are hesitant when writing.

This book is consistent in its level of understanding. I would not hesitate to use this book for first year composition students and even higher level developmental students. The language use is college level but in a way that doesn't leave any learner out with vocabulary or structure.

I find that this textbook could be used as a whole or with specific chapters for specific students and/or skills. As far as accessibility for all students, with or without special needs, I find that this book would work for all students. The clear headings and breakdown of sections is easily divisible without any loss of organization or structure for student learning. Different sections could be utilized to work on specific needs of various students in the class without any loss of understanding by the students.

I really like the beginning to end way in which the book is organized. The book begins with setting student worry at ease with the basics for understanding reading and research and how to go about performing both aspects. The actual "writing" adds a nice touch to show students how to take notes and use these to help in their own writing. The information for finding texts really struck me as useful for students to continue to refer to even in later years.

I feel this textbook is very user friendly. The only challenge that I can see would be finding the place you were in when you click on a link. When you return to the book it brings you back to the first page. The check your work has students go to the Appendix and I wonder how many students will take the time to scroll through the book instead of being able to click on the checkmark and go directly to the Appendix.

In reading the book I found no grammatical errors.

As a teacher of Diversity as well as English I am always sensitive to what I present to my students. I would have no problem using this textbook in my classroom.

As a community college professor I am happy to see books authored by community college faculty. The community college student can be very different from the four-year college or university student. Many of may students need extra help especially with reading and writing and this textbook is easy and understandable for all students whether two year or four year.

Reviewed by Thomasina Hughey, Instructor, Integrated Reading and Writing, Aiken Technical College on 2/22/21

As a source for integrated reading and writing, I found the text to be a foundational reading source; although more heavily weighted towards writing. I appreciated the "Check Your Understanding" sections. read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

I did not denote any errors.

The text can transcend time as written, maintaining its relevancy. As well, it is written in such a manner that time-sensitive text can easily be inserted and excerpted, as necessary to enhance reading comprehension.

Clear and concise conversational writing that is easy to follow and provoke critical thinking.

An Instructor may pick and choose how to use portions of the text without losing context.

There is flexibility in usage dependent expected learning outcomes.

The text is well-organized with sentences flowing fluently an example for students to follow in their own writing. An instructional approach may be defined as students are reading to write.

I did not detect any glitches.

I did not see any grammatical errors.

The text is gender inclusive given its explanation of pronoun usage. Further, the text is developed in such a manner that culturally inclusive readings could easily be embedded. I would recommend student selected cultural readings.

I recommend supplemental supporting documents to further hone the Reading Process and bridge the connectivity between reading and writing to learn.

Reviewed by Rachana Son, Part-Time Writing Faculty, Portland Community College on 1/15/21

The textbook manages to demystify reading at a college-level by breaking down active reading into steps including pre-reading strategies and effective note-taking. There are also tips for analyzing texts and detailed demonstrations of close-reading. The "Troubleshoot Your Reading" section is rather novel in how it directly interacts with the reader by providing empathetic reactions to the difficulties students face while offering feasible suggestions on how to make reading more manageable and engaging. The part on writing is even more thorough. The textbook explores in detail the different stages of writing and the structure of an essay, providing multiple examples related to these topics. Integrating sources and creating citations are also covered. Like with "Troubleshoot Your Reading," there are sections dedicated to difficulties while writing including anxiety and writer's block. The glossary could, however, be expanded to include more keywords and concepts (ex. "dialectic," specific rhetorical appeals, "thesis").

The content accurately reflects common practices and expectations in college reading and writing. It is both unbiased and error-free.

The text does not contain popular references that would go stale or feel outdated in a short amount of time. The external websites might pose a problem as links can expire or change, but such links can be easily replaced and updated when needed.

The text is easy to read and approachable, not being too technical or using flowery prose. Terms are defined and re-introduced when needed.

The text revisits terms and concepts as appropriate, their definitions unchanging. The tone feels unified as though there is only one author throughout the textbook. The intended audience does not change either, as the reader is assumed to be a degree-seeking student just entering college.

Within each section, the text is divided into manageable pieces, taking only a few minutes to read and digest. Headings and sub-headings are used to break up longer sections of text. The different levels of headings are consistent in use of font size and color.

The textbook is divided mostly into two parts: "Working with Texts" and "Writing." The different sections in each part are placed appropriately in that sections prior to the second part deal with reading and interacting with texts while the rest of textbook focuses on completing writing assignments and building an essay. The sections are presented in a logical order as well. For instance, the section on pre-writing comes before drafting, which comes before revising.

In the online version, navigating the textbook is easy. The Table of Content shows how the text is divided into sections and allows for sections to be collapsed or expanded. The PDF version does have some problems with graphics overlapping text (ex. "Check Your Understanding" icon overlapping the beginning of the text), sometimes making words unreadable.

I did not find any grammatical errors or at least none that were distracting.

The text holds up to its promise in using a variety of pronouns including singular "they." The text could benefit from acknowledging its focus on Western tradition and rhetoric, as many students reading this textbook may be familiar with different writing conventions and styles.

This textbook has been very useful in my lectures as many of my students are entering their first year in college and are understandably unfamiliar with college reading and writing conventions. I appreciate the sections about reading because students have different levels and backgrounds in reading, so we can't assume one reading strategy would work for everyone. Furthermore, the textbook does not feel daunting at all. You are able to read any section at an as-needed basis; reading the entire textbook is not necessary.

Reviewed by Shanell Sanchez, Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Southern Oregon University on 1/12/21

Wow, this text covered reading and writing in one! I was so impressed with how the book was able to start at the basics of learning to read successfully in college (and life) to writing. I teach a methods course that I have always found so challenging to teach for two reasons: students do not how to properly read journal articles and they do not know how to write research papers. This text allows for both these skills to be honed in on and the book was enjoyable. The text covers how to read, understand, and incorporate sources into a paper. There is also a great section on how to annotate and take notes over readings. I love the section in the first, second, and third person. I often tell students they cannot use the first person in research papers but they are often unsure what I mean by that. I will certainly use that chapter! Perhaps really relevant to college students is the section on how to evaluate sources. There is also a section on plagiarism, which is always a concern in a research and writing course. Lastly, it includes help with citation but it is only for MLA.

Overall, I did not see any glaring errors in the text. I cannot say for sure if the MLA citations are correct or up to date since I use APA and ASA, but that may need to be evaluated.

The content is up-to-date and relevant. I think any updates would be easy to do. I would love to see them use more than just MLA.

I think they wrote conversationally. In fact, I felt like I was listening to them teach from time to time while reading The jargon in research and writing was always broken down and explained.

The voice is the same throughout the book. I would have liked to see more transition to sections because it did feel choppy. However, an advantage to that is I will most likely use parts of the book and feel ok about that. I do not think students will think they are 'missing' something by reading only sections in my courses.

This text is easily and readily divisible into smaller reading sections. In fact, this was what set this text apart from other materials I have used in the past. The sections are small enough that people can add to them and long enough to give enough detail. I never felt overwhelmed while reading and was actually enjoying going through the text.

I love how they started with reading and moved into writing. The flow of this book felt natural and I am sure that will help students be successful.

I tried the PDF and the online version and did not see any glaring problems. There were no features that could distract or confuse the reader.

I did not see any grammatical errors in the text.

It was impressive how the text made a point to use gender-neutral language. The beginning of the book also had a discussion on pronouns, which may be beneficial to students who have never encountered pronouns before. I found the book to be very inclusive.

Reviewed by Christian Aguiar, Asst Professor of English, The University of the District of Columbia on 12/22/20

The text offers a shorter, more concise approach to research-based writing than the traditional first-year writing textbook - it is, in some ways, more like an extended or enhanced writing handbook. It covers the most important elements of a research-based writing course: how to read, understand, and incorporate souces; how to respond critically to texts and engage with authors meaningfully in writing; how to evaluate sources; and how to cite sources using MLA style. It also includes a section dealing with the writing process as well as a brief review of revision approaches and common errors. It does not contain extensive sections on grammar, mechanics, punctuation and the like.

The content is generally in keeping with established practices/patterns in teaching core research, writing and information literacy skills.

The authors’ approach here is very much that of the research/writing handbook or guide, so the content should remain relevant for years to come. There are some embedded links to essays and articles from the mid-2010s that may benefit from updating before use. The information literacy section is quite strong, but it too would benefit from supplementation to keep it current.

The text is clear and concise. It’s also more approachable than most similar texts: a sample chapter yields a moderate readability score pegged to a 9th grade reading level.

The text is quite consistent from section to section in terms of voice, content, and approach.

The text lends well to being broken up; indeed, the foreword suggests it has been designed specifically for this. Individual sections generally work as stand-alone readings. There are also frequent hyperlinks to other chapters that are mentioned, outside resources, and readings, which enhances reader engagement and modularity.

The text is divided into two larger parts - Working with Texts & Writing - with several sub-sections within each part. The sub-sections are each linked separately from the table of contents, which makes the text easy to navigate.

The interface is clear and consistent. The text would perhaps benefit from more visually distinct sub-headings in some of the longer sections.

In two years of using this text I have yet to find an error.

The text is very much a handbook rather than a reader, so it offers few extended examples and no embedded readings for students. In this sense, it’s something of a cultural clean slate. The authors have done well to avoid gendered language and to use gender neutral third person pronouns where appropriate.

The text is ideal for use in an OER research-based writing course or as a supplement for a course where students will be expected to complete independent research. It is easily broken down into modules, clear, concise, and engaging.

Reviewed by Patricia Lynne, Professor, Framingham State University on 6/30/20

The book does a very good job with reading guidance and support, both the work of reading and writing about texts -- much better than most first-year writing texts that I have used (both OER and not). It also covers writing process matters and approaches to parts of academic papers well overall. There are, however, some areas that are relatively thin (e.g., dealing with opposing viewpoints, revision). There is little about common college-level writing tasks -- at least separated so that it can be found easily -- though there is some embedded discussion. There is no index, but there is a useful glossary.

The book does a good job presenting clear and specific information to students. While there are specific elements that I could quibble with (e.g., the explanation of logos), the information is accurate and consistent with thinking in the field.

The material is up-to-date, and while there are elements that will become dated, most of those elements would be links that become obsolete. Those are easy to fix. The information literacy section is strong. While it runs the risk of becoming dated, it's set up with a focus on general principles that have been in practice for quite some time.

This textbook is pitched quite well. The authors talk with their audience, not to their audience. They explain terminology clearly in the text, as well as providing a glossary.

The rhetorical approach is consistent throughout, as are the vocabulary, tone, use of images, and links to outside sources.

This is a key strength of this text. The chunks of text are quite manageable and easily inserted into a range of course sequences and designs. There are a number of internal links, but they are not treated as central to the point of the sections in which they appear, and there are very few moments in which the text refers to the content of other sections -- and none in ways that would make it difficult for a student to follow.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 3

I believe that this is the biggest weakness of this text. There are explanations of elements of common assignments (e.g., summary, critique, argument), but they are embedded and without an index, it would be hard for students to find those sections. In addition, it's not clear why the material about writing summaries, paraphrasing, and quoting is part of the drafting section and not part of either "Using Sources Correctly" or the information literacy section. It's also not clear why the information literacy section and the sources section are so far apart.

For the most part, this is done well. The images are clear, and the navigation appears to work the way that Pressbooks intends. (I don't like the way I have to navigate to the top of the page to move to the next section, but this seems to be a Pressbooks issue and not specific to this textbook). The interface online is better than the PDF version. In the online version, it is much easier to see the hierarchy of the headings because they are color-coded. The PDF also has a lot of blank pages.

I found no grammatical errors, but there are a few typos.

While there is an explanation of the use of pronouns near the beginning of the text, there is little diversity in the examples.

There are parts of this text that I found outstanding (the guide on reading strategies, for example), and I plan to use them in my fall classes.

Reviewed by Ben Greenlee, Instructor, Colorado State University on 6/30/20

As other reviewers have stated, a "comprehensive" discussion of reading and writing could fill volumes so the term may not be as applicable here. That said, I do feel this book lays out many fundamental aspects of reading and writing for early college-level learners, breaking the concepts of academic reading and writing into two sections (though "reading" receives a third of the page space), which offers those learners a nice introduction into composition. Looking on a smaller scale, many of the sections are a page/page-and-a-half which doesn't allow for much context or examples, really a snapshot of the term or concept. I feel this book works best as slight readings before a class period with the majority of the class spent on examples and application. Basically, reading the book alone would offer little insight to reading and writing at an early academic level.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

The majority of the information presented seems accurate, though, as mentioned, much of the content is quick and conversational. For instance, in the section titled "Read Efficiently," the last paragraph suggests that a learner should "Keep reading until you’re done. Don’t be distracted. If you begin to feel fidgety, stop, get up, and take a five minute break. Then get back to your reading. The more you read, the stronger your habit will grow, and the easier reading will be." Not awful advice, perhaps even meeting a student on their level of comfort with a text, but I feel it too quickly glosses over other established strategies for distracted reading, strategies that could be explained in similar language yet with added context. Again, the content is fairly accurate, but perhaps distilled too much.

The information offered in each section feels up-to-date, with relevant examples such as Harry Potter and Sparknotes and the latest edition of MLA. Aspects of the brief sections work toward updating in the future (there's not a lot of content to modify) and other instructors could easily remix or add examples of their own. Students could also appreciate the direct approach of the content as relevant to their hectic schedules, not needing to read long, dense chapters to "get" the heart of the concept of technique.

For the intended reader, an early-college learner, the writing is clear and direct and approachable. There is consistent use of "you" and a lack of jargon or technical language. Additional context could be provided, especially in the "Reading" section, but the "Writing" section offers additional opportunity for understanding through examples and clear exercises that connect to the section's content.

In terms of a framework, the text is consistently displayed through design choices and language used--a student could read page 1 and page 100 and know they are reading the same writer with the same purpose. There could've been greater attention to connections made from section to section, adding an additional layer to the notion of "consistency," but overall the work is of a whole.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this work. Each section is small/compact and could be remixed at another instructor's preferences or linked with other readings without a major workload for students. Sections range from several hundred words to several thousand and many sections don't need to be read/used at all depending on the nature of the class. Students will appreciate the brevity and contained nature of the sections.

As stated, the topics are organized with a focus on reading first (about a third of the text) then shifts to writing (with longer section for each new term/approach/technique). Each of the two halves starts with fundamental aspects such as "What is a Text?" and "Why write?" to usher students into conversations about what they're actually doing. From there the text deepens concepts through questions one could ask themselves to exercises (mainly in "Writing" section) which would apply the concepts, building on what came before.

I used the text through multiple platforms and devices and experienced no issues with image distortion or display features. Easy and clear content bar for navigation. Some students accessed the text through their phones (more advanced and expensive than my own) and didn't experience any issues either.

The text contained no grammatical errors that I noticed.

The text actively discusses the use of pronouns and gender-neutral language. There is also respectful attention paid to race, ethnicity, and other backgrounds. As mentioned, the use of "you" is used throughout but does not read as alienating or assumptive, striking a welcoming tone.

While this book lays a solid foundation for reading and writing, an instructor should not rely too heavily on the content offered. It "does the job" but doesn't create space for nuance or much critical engagement (it probably doesn't need to). I would use the text again, but would add even more supplementary content than before.

Reviewed by Zach Buscher, Assistant Professor of English, Mount Wachusett Community College on 6/29/20

The textbook covers all of the information found in the tried and true style guide I've been using for the past ten years. My students will benefit greatly from getting this same information free of charge. In some ways, it goes beyond the previous style guide I've used in that it presents and differentiates between different types of thesis statements, addresses the cons of the five-paragraph/three-point essay, etc.

As others have noted, the presence of an "Index" would likely elevate the given score for this category. I would also have appreciated more "Check Your Understanding" exercises and a more frequent use of examples as well. Also, if you've come to the text looking for material on grammar, I would look elsewhere since that section is quite brief. In an ENG 101 course, it could be enough.

I couldn't find any inaccuracies in the text.

Although the New York Times and Scientific American articles referenced are already outdated, sections on "Using Citation Generators," "Writing Anxiety" (not just Writer's Block), and using information in the digital age should work well for audiences both now and in the future. In sections on note-taking, I would have focused on electronic material in more or less equal measure to print material.

The book has a very accessible, almost conversational prose style that is refreshingly less dry than other style guides I have used. For example, we are given a "seriously expert level suggestion" (12). Later, a book's structure is described as "ridiculously cool" (28). The occasional pronunciation guide pops up for terms like "rhetoric" and "critique."

Not only is the text internally consistent (impressive considering the number of authors), but it's also externally consistent in that the terminology used is more or less universal. Even when they refer to a "CRAP Test" rather than a "CRAAP Test," the authors note that other institutions add the second "A."

You'll find a healthy dose of white space between chapter headings and content. Throughout, there are numerous subheadings to be found.

It's well-structured using a traditional two-part approach wherein one part is more on "Reading" and the other more on "Writing." That's fine, but I wouldn't have minded a more novel approach.

Organizational Highlight: Putting the section on "Revision" so near the end of the book, a highly logical place for it.

Questionable Move: Why separate the section on constructing a "Works Cited" from the section on in-text citation? I think it's important that students see the relationship further solidified in their textbook.

The book's aesthetic is minimalist in nature. I found the font choices quite tasteful, for instance.

A couple interface suggestions based on my reading of the text in pdf form:

*Appreciated linking to Scientific American article (among others), but the fact of its click-ability was by no means obvious on the formatting alone.

*I appreciated seeing the logos for “Copyright,” “Creative Commons,” etc. but they are superimposed on the text in a way that makes the text underneath more or less illegible

I would have done more with integrated video, which I believe is only used once.

The text seems to be free of grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

I certainly wouldn't call the book "insensitive" or "offensive" by any means, but I found the textual examples lacking in diversity. From my perspective, it's a representational issue. You'll find references to DFW, Mark Z. Danielewski, Ray Bradbury, Ernest Hemingway, Dr. Seuss, J.D. Salinger, Michael Pollen, etc. but relatively few references to female writers (Harper Lee notwithstanding) and writers of color. Perhaps that could be addressed in future editions!

Overall, this was a great introduction to OER. I plan on using sections from this book and others to replace the overpriced style guide and save my students some money.

Reviewed by Luana McCuish, Professor of English, Bunker Hill Community College on 6/29/20

The text is thorough in its exploration of the reading and writing connection. It includes helpful examples for the student. It will work well for entry-level students since it covers many topics that may be unfamiliar to a new student, whether first-generation or international. It seems to be sensitive to students' needs and responsive to potential areas of confusion. Both the online and PDF version have limited graphics, but those presented are helpful to creating understanding for the student. The glossary is limited and does not include links to the original context. The text would benefit from an index.

The text is accurate. While the text strives and succeeds at being unbiased, the neutrality may limit strong dialogue. In a quest to be inclusive, some of the examples seemed forced. In contrast, some of the references -- Goldilocks and Dr. Seuss -- assume the reader was raised in the United States. I did not notice any errors in the text.

The content is mostly up-to-date. As noted in accuracy, some literary references may not be familiar to readers. The links within the online version are easy to access. Since more and more online sources require subscriptions, these links may create a challenge for students who wish to reread articles. One site offers three free articles per month. However, it would be easy for an instructor to change the links to accessible articles. In the PDF version, I found it frustrating that I could not click on a link to read the article or access other online sources.

The text is mostly clear. Some language and references may not be easily accessible for ELL or students with limited exposure to reading and writing language. Some examples include "Goldilocks", NASA, fraught, egalitarianism, flashbacks and dream sequence. While the author clearly wanted to keep the prose simple, there are a few areas that needed further explanation. Overall, the text is accessible.

The online version of the text is consistent. Navigation is easy. The format of each section is predictable and intuitive. Most of the sections present a manageable amount of material. Students will move easily through the reading and writing process. The "check your understanding" is an effective way to end each section.

The structure of the text is effective. The instructor may easily change the order in which materials are used. The online version is more adaptable than the PDF. The PDF does not label all pages, so helping students navigate to different sections may be challenging. The table of contents in the PDF does allow for a quick click to shift to different sections. However, the PDF offers the ability to use the text reader, highlighter and notes.

Overall, I like the organization of both the PDF and online version. The text focuses first on developing strong reading skills, which is a necessary skill if one is to become a stronger writer. The text progresses nicely through the steps of developing these skills. While the text is skill-based, it does not feel this way. There is no busy work. There is a fair amount of application of the skills. The text effectively moves students from personal thoughts to summary to essay to research.

I liked both the PDF and online version. Both have some good features. Images/charts and other displays are not distorted. The text is limited on graphics, a few more might help the reader. I liked the real examples of brainstorming, note-taking, etc. More of these may be helpful to the student. The PDF offers some good features, including the ability to have the text read aloud, the highlighting feature and the note-taking feature. The PDF is more adaptable to enlarging the text. The PDF presents challenges when asking students to find online sources. Adding a link or hyperlink would alleviate this. The online version allows easy navigation via both contents menu and the next section link at the bottom of each page. One challenge with the online version is that when I attempted to increase the size of the font, the contents menu covered the left side of the text. In addition, the chosen font is not good for online reading. Arial would be a better choice (as was used in the headings).

No major grammatical errors were noted.

The text is mostly neutral in its presentation. Some inclusiveness seems forced: i.e. the exercises on audience and purpose. Many of the literary references seem to assume knowledge of U.S. culture: i.e. "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Catcher in the Rye", both of which may be standard reading in high school, but not all students will have had this exposure. While I enjoyed many of the chosen photos and other forms of art, there could be more diversity in the choices. The text is neither insensitive nor offensive, but it could be more inclusive.

Overall, I like the text. The structure is effective. It is easy to read and navigate. An instructor could easily supplement when necessary. The text will work well for beginning college students who need structure and guidance to develop a strong basis in reading and writing. I will consider using this text.

Reviewed by Julie Tovar, Adjunct Instructor, Middlesex Community College on 6/2/20

This textbook is comprehensive without being overwhelming. For example, it starts from the basics of "What is a Text?" yet also explores various aspects of textual analysis--from sentence and paragraph levels to synthesizing readings. read more

The authors present information in a straightforward way, yet the tone feels inclusive for beginning college students.

The writers anticipate and respond effectively to the many questions and needs of beginning college writers. The textbook's readings and examples are current and engaging. "Check your Understanding" questions help students practice the material covered, and many prompts are posed to promote thinking and discussion, rather than having cut and dried answers.

Explanations are clear and engaging, and the hyperlinks connect to thought provoking, relevant texts that effectively demonstrate concepts.

Although written by multiple authors, the book feels cohesive and the sections fit together in a logical manner.

The Word on College Reading and Writing is divided into manageable segments that can be used or skipped as the instructor wishes.

I appreciate the chapter on Writing About Texts that covers the ways students should approach analyzing texts, and I'm glad that this is separate from the Writing section, which explains the various aspects of the writing process for college courses.

I did not experience any major problems navigating within the textbook.

The book is free of major grammatic errors.

In the "Critiquing a Text" section, bias and 'cultural context' are mentioned as points for students to consider, but they aren't explored in-depth. A more in-depth explanation of cultural context would be helpful.

Overall, a terrific resource for teachers of developmental and Comp 1 courses!

Reviewed by Molly McClennen, Instructor, Marshall University on 5/12/20

I have been looking for a book that covers the full range of topics I cover in the reading/writing classes I teach without overwhelming the students with a lot of extraneous information we will not be covering in the class. Most books either take too cursory an approach to important topics or omit topics I cover, so I spend a lot of time supplementing the text with additional materials. This text hits almost everything I believe my students need to learn about in the class and includes sufficient information about reading, something that I am always surprised to find is glossed over in many writing textbooks, given how interrelated reading and writing are.

I have read extensively on the topic of post-secondary literacy development and did not find anything in this text that concerned me regarding the accuracy of the information based on what is known about how college students develop as readers and writers.

The web-based version of the book includes links to online readings that students can use to apply and practice the skills the textbook introduces. (And the print-based book provides instructions for how to find these readings using a web search.) The linked readings cover a variety of topics and genres, which introduce students to the kinds of readings they will be doing in their gateway college classes. The topics covered in the book are relevant to the kinds of skills students need to succeed in their college classes.

The clarity of the text is one of my favorite features. The information is presented briefly and written using succinct, straightforward language. I believe this is a text that my students will read because it eliminates extraneous information and gets to the point of what they need to know about reading and writing.

I did not notice any obvious problems with consistency in the text.

The textbook lends itself well to being taught in modules, and this is how I plan to use it. I teach project-based classes and will use various parts of the text to introduce students to the reading and writing skills they will need to use as they work on the various parts of their projects. The breakdown of topics in the two sections of the book make it easy to choose topics you want to cover--for example, if you believe your students do not need to learn about how to write a paragraph, you can skip that topic easily.

I was pleased with how this text is organized because, while it includes sections devoted specifically to reading and writing, it takes a more integrated approach to the two. Many texts treat reading and writing as discrete skills, which I do not believe is the most effective way for students to learn either skill. The progression of ideas in the text is logical, reflecting how skills build on one another and the progression of the writing process.

I found it easy to navigate both the print and online versions of the text. It has a well-organized and logical table of contents that allow readers to find the information they need with a click.

I noticed no grammatical mistakes in the text as I read through it.

I had no concerns about the cultural sensitivity of the text as I read through it. It uses gender neutral language to model this for students in their own writing.

I teach freshmen level classes for both ESL students (who have the English proficiency to take college classes) and native English speakers. I believe this text works well for both populations. The text is not fancy or beautiful--it is plain in appearance--but don't let that put you off from it because the information it contains is good and I believe will be helpful to my students.

Reviewed by Lisa Suter, Assistant Professor of English, Metropolitan State University of Denver on 3/6/20

I don't think that the word "comprehensiveness" is easily applied to subjects as capacious as reading and writing, frankly, but there is a great deal of useful materiel covered here for students new to analyzing and creating college-level texts. A supplementary set of instructor resources (assignments, readings, handouts, etc.) is also partially set up, with the promise of more to come. I am a rhetoric scholar, and wanted more coverage of this field's connection to reading and writing, but one cannot hope to cover everything in one text. Likewise, I would have liked to see more than just MLA citation style covered--so many students will need APA--but overall, a solid introduction to college reading and writing methods.

There are a few content areas that are not as strong as the rest: e.g., the definition of rhetoric in the glossary does not reflect how the word is defined within the field today. I also found the "point of view" section (in the tone and voice section) to be a reductive and inaccurate explanation of how scholars use 1st person, for example. But these are small quibbles: for the most part, the content seems correct.

I found the content to be very up to date, e.g., the information in the citation section on MLA 8th edition requirements. I also think the *quantity* of information offered in each section reflects a thoughtful attention to today's college student demographics that should be mentioned. At the state university where I teach, approximately 80% of our student body works in addition to taking classes, and quite a lot of them work full time. Factor in heavy urban commute times, family or child care, and all the rest, and you have a recipe for students not having much time (or mental energy) to complete long reading assignments. I think the pithiness of these sections is very relevant to their full and challenging lives, myself.

The writing throughout is very clear, as one would hope in a writing textbook, lol. It is quite accessible even for first-gen or ESL students, I believe. I also found that the images of different pre-writing strategies (in the "Strategies for Getting Started" section) added some visual clarity, as well.

The terminology and framework were both quite consistent. Also consistent throughout the text was a tone of respect for the student endeavoring to earn a college degree, which I liked a lot. I loved the section called "Troubleshooting Your Reading," for example, which attempts to take students' frustrations with their college workload seriously, yet still tries to persuade them to commit to the task at every turn.

The units are well laid out, and I could imagine using the smaller sections in various combinations. They are nicely self contained and could be rearranged in many ways.

It is a small point, but I greatly appreciate the focus on how serious reading develops one's skill as a writer, a point the authors make explicitly at the beginning. I think most senior scholars take this point for granted, yet many undergraduate students seem to want to know how to write better without understanding that reading is a necessary part of that development. As for structure and flow, I felt both were smooth throughout.

I read the book on my (smallish) Samsung Galaxy cell phone, just to see what the reading experience would be like on a small screen. For the most part, it worked without any hitch--there was just an occasional (odd-looking) bar that came up at the bottom of the reading pane that didn't seem connected to anything, and it didn't want to go away. It didn't interfere greatly with my reading; I just couldn't figure out what it was or how to make it go away.

The text is clean of the typos and grammatical erors that plague many quickly-written texts, including some of those coming out of traditional publishing houses. This is important for the ethos of a writing textbook, of course.

I saw that another reviewer had commented on this, and perhaps several have, but I do genuinely appreciate the careful and again, respectful tone of the editors' language about gender and pronoun usage in their text. Educators today know that young adults are especially vulnerable at the traditional college age, and some studies have shown that such a simple thing as using a student's preferred name or pronouns can reduce suicidal ideation in teens. So this is not just p.c. terminology from where I stand, but rather, an important point to make up front, which they did. Kudos!

Reviewed by Cherie Nelson, Instructor, Colorado State University on 11/19/19

The Word on College Reading and Writing, is heavily skills based and does not seem to be informed (at least not explicitly,) by a larger theoretical framework. This text does a nice job talking about the skills necessary for a beginning writing class. The text is split up into two main sections, beginning with a discussion of how students can develop reading skills, something that wouldn’t be appropriate for an upper-level composition course, but provides a nice foundation for students entering the writing classroom on a college campus for the first time. The second section speaks to writing skills and processes. The book includes a short glossary, but does not include all specialized language or terms defined in the text (for example, logos, ethos, and pathos are absent from this list.) There is no section in the textbook that speaks to research in a separate way, but some of the basic concepts of research can be found in other sections within both Part 1: Reading and Part 2: Writing such as “What is Information Literacy?” and “The Paragraph Body: Supporting Your Ideas.” Overall, the text gives students an overview of the writing and reading processes needed for an introductory writing course.

The content of the text appeared to be accurate, error-free, and unbiased. Most of the content included in the text talks broadly about strategies and skills with which to approach writing, and any specific content knowledge included appeared to be accurate and error-free.

Most of the examples given throughout the text seemed to be current. At different points throughout the text, the authors reference cultural examples such as Goldilocks, Sparknotes, Snopes, etc, examples that students would understand and will probably be relevant for at least the next five years. The content also seems to be directed toward reading and writing skills that will continue to be relevant for those reading and writing in college classrooms. Because of the way the book is organized, with each section divided up into chapters and pages with subheadings, it seems like minute changes to keep the information up-to-date would be easy to implement for the publishers.

The text is written with a specific audience in mind, first year college students, and writes in a tone that is appropriate for those students, often addressing the student as “you” and discussing writing in the specific context of a beginning university composition class. As this text doesn’t contain much of a theoretical framework for writing and reading, but rather presents a down-to-earth collection of skills and strategies, there isn’t much jargon or domain-specific language that would need to be defined for the audience.

The text is fairly consistent throughout and makes these consistencies helpful for students by sometimes providing internal links that connect similar or related concepts together throughout the space of the text. There are not many (if any) places where the text contradicts itself or gives information that a student wouldn’t understand in light of the content that precedes it. There are, however, opportunities for bridging connections that could have made the think more effective, especially between the reading and writing sections of the text. For example, in the “Paragraph Analysis” page in Part 1: Reading, the authors describe a paragraph as being made up of three chunks: a topic sentence, several sentences that support and explain the topic sentence, and a sentence that helps transition to the next paragraph. In the section “The Body Paragraph: Supporting Your Ideas” in Part 2: Writing, the authors say that good paragraphs contain four sections, separating the middle section referenced in the Part 1 into evidence and explanation separately. This is a picky observation, but more consistency and connections are helpful when teaching students about being readers who write and writers who read.

The text is divided up in easy sections for students. There are two parts to the book: reading and writing, and each part contains chapters with several titled sections in each chapter. Most of the titled sections are short, but can range anywhere from 200-3,000 words in length. The short nature of the chapter subheadings, and the simple way with which students can navigate through the ebook would make it easy to assign particular chunks of reading to fit with particular course goals and objectives. Longer sections, such as “Finding Quality Texts” which clocks in at over 3,000 words, breaks up the text with headings and bolded key terms and ideas.

The topics presented within the text are done so in a logical way, first discussing reading skills, strategies, and concepts before moving into writing about reading to moving into writing texts as a whole. This mirrors the approach taken within our composition department where the emphasis in the first unit is on close and critical reading and then moves towards the students using these reading skills in order to create a myriad of their own texts.

After using ebooks with horrendous interface systems, I was overjoyed with the simplicity, effectiveness, and straightforwardness of this design. The text has a helpful “contents” bar at the top (or left side) of the screen that allows students to navigate to any chapter and section that they would like to access. The interface also lets students navigate by a forward and back bar at the bottom of the page that lists the titles of the previous and next section along with arrows in their respective directions. The page allows students to choose between two sizes of font to customize their reading experience. The text also includes internal links to other parts of the book (answers to embedded activities, other relevant sections, etc.), external links, and embedded videos, all which seem to work well and give students a more interactive experience with their text.

The text contained no noticeable grammatical errors.

I was pleased to find, in the introduction to this text, a word on the use of pronouns throughout. The authors make a concerted effort, as well as implement including he/she/they pronouns throughout the text in order to make an effort towards inclusion. The text primarily addresses the student reading and their experience with a general “you,” but the authors are careful not to assume all of the students reading share the same college experience. For example, the authors make provision for students who are usually deemed “nontraditional” by their institutions, also using examples of those students who will have children and other outside responsibilities, not just first year college students who are attending within a few years of graduating high school.

Reviewed by Alice Henton, Assistant Professor of English , Richard Bland College on 4/10/19

The text covers a wide variety of critical reading and writing practices, from general introductions (“what is a text”) to specific strategies (“dialectic note taking) and in-depth appraisals of the components of academic writing (“the paragraph body”). In addition to the explanatory material, the text includes appendicies, a glossary, and numerous exercises for students to complete.

The text appears to be devoid of inaccuracies as well as any indications of authorial bias.

The text feels up-to-date and incorporates a variety of textual examples, including many digital resources. The section in “Information Literacy” that provides detailed guidelines for a variety digital literacies, from Creative Commons to BiTorrent, is particularly useful.

The text is approachable and direct, with a clearly student-centered perspective that comes through in both form and content.

Style, tone, and organization are consistent throughout.

Overall, the work lives up to its promise to be a "use it as you need it kind of text." Units are clearly divided into concise sections that can be excerpted and organized according to course requirements and student needs.

The text is logically organized into two parts (“Working with Texts” and “Writing”) with relevant subdivisions within each. I would agree with previous reviewers’ suggestion that the “Information Literacy” subsection might make more sense before rather than after the “Writing About Texts” subsection, but as each unit is self-contained enough to be assigned in any order, it feels like a minor issue.

All links within the text worked when tried, and online interaction was not difficult. There is a nice awareness throughout of all of the different potential mediums for textual interaction, as when graphics using different colors to demonstrate significance come with explanations for those who might be viewing a black-and-white printout of the material.

Text appears well edited, with no obvious grammatical errors.

Beginning in the introduction, where gendered and gender neutral language is explained in clear and concise terms, this text demonstrates admirable sensitivity to issues of inclusivity and representation. Examples used throughout engage with broad spectrums of gender/race/class identities.

This text provides a strong overview of many necessary reading and writing skills. Part 1, which covers Working with Texts, Building Strong Reading Skills, Writing about Texts, and Information Literacy, provides a broad basis upon which students can easily build, and seems particularly useful as an introduction to academic techniques and practices. The definition of an academic text offered in this volume is the clearest and most useful I have ever encountered. Additionally, I find the pragmatic approach the authors take to be refreshing and engaging. Strategies like including both the pros and cons for conventional writing practices such as outlining, or breaking up long reading assignments into sections by dividing the number of pages total with the number of days before the readings are due, when coupled with acknowledgements of the realities of student experience (instead of pretending resources like SparkNotes don’t exist, the authors clearly articulate the limitations of the content they provide, as well as the perceived advantages in using them) help to create a text that feels not just student-oriented, but student-friendly.

Reviewed by Melissa Cheese, Assistant Professor, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania on 1/23/19

This book is very thorough and includes key elements that will help college students strengthen their reading and writing skills. The author concludes each section with engaging activities for the reader to check their understanding of the text and shares the answers in the appendix as a guide. This is a great way to motivate students to reflect and make meaningful connections to the text.

Information in the text is accurate and free from grammatical errors.

The content of the text is current and includes real-life examples/exercises and other modes of sharing information (such as websites, videos, etc.) that are relatable to college-age students. The reading and writing strategies shared are skills that can be transferrable to other college level courses.

The author has written the text in a way that is clear and easy for the reader to comprehend.

The text is consistent in terms of its tone, terminology, and conversational style of writing.

The sections of the text can be reorganized in any order based upon the course format and student needs.

The text is well organized. The author divides the contents of the text into two distinct parts; the first half focusing on working with texts as a reader and the second half as a writer.

Both the PDF and online interfaces work well.

The text is well written and free from grammatical errors.

Culturally responsive images/photos are used in the exercises/activities of various sections that pertain to ethnicity, gender, age, etc.

Overall, this text would be very useful for an introductory reading and/or writing class for college freshmen.

Reviewed by Amanda Sieling, Assistant Professor, Southwest Minnesota State University on 1/7/19

This book covers all of the main ideas necessary for teaching college writing. I'm looking for a primer of sorts to use to remind my upper-level students of the basics of writing and research for their capstone project. This book has everything I am looking for from sentence and paragraph structure to formulating the thesis. I'm particularly impressed with the chapters that are focused on reading. This is an area that my students (even the upper-level students) need to work on. I'm planning on delving into these chapters over the first couple of weeks of class to help them have a better understanding of how to read their research!

I found no inaccuracies in the content and no evidence of bias on the part of the authors.

The content is fresh and not reliant on pop culture references that will be obsolete in a year or two.

I found the book to be a very easy read - the language used is clear and concise and, most importantly to me, there are a lot of examples! Exemplars are so important in writing. There is even a small section on grammar and common mistakes which I am hoping my students will take to heart!

The book is internally consistent - the headings are consistent throughout making it easy to skim through and the text is consistent in tone and voice making it easy to ready.

This is one of the biggest advantages of this book in my mind. It will be very easy to assign certain portions of the text to my students. The sections are often short (which I'm hoping will mean my students will actually do the assigned reading!) and can be used in whatever order I need for the week. They seem to stand alone for the most part so I can assign the one on brainstorming a topic before or after one on reading....

I think the organization worked. I will probably use the chapters out of order though because of my audience (upper-level students) and the assignment (capstone project).

The text is clear and most of the hyperlinks I tried worked. I liked that the authors didn't just rely on hyperlinks though - they also specifically instructed readers on how to search the Internet for a particular item just in case the item didn't work. For example, I clicked on the link for martinlutherking.org and found that it is no longer up. But it also gave me the idea to search "false websites teachers use" which led me to a bunch of other sites that were similar to the MLK one. So I consider that a win - it's a great resource for examples to use in my teaching!

I found one or two errors but nothing major.

The authors did a good job at inclusivity and sensitivity. In the examples, most races, genders, and classes are represented. The discussion on pronouns is current.

I really appreciate the examples in this book. Throughout my plans for the semester I have notes for myself to "find examples of..." Now I don't have to! I plan on using this book to show students examples of paraphrasing versus quoting, writing strong thesis statements, etc. The one addition I would really like to see is a section on APA as that is the citation method we will be using. But well done!

Reviewed by Abbey Payeur, Teaching Partner , Bethel University on 11/17/18

This textbook starts at the very basic level of defining a text and teaching strategies for pre-reading and reading. It moves into annotating and taking notes, and then reflecting on what you've read to discover the author's message. There is a nice section to help students troubleshoot common reading problems, and then it moves on to a section titled "Writing about Texts." This section covers important skills such as reading critically; using text structures to aid in comprehension; and analyzing rhetoric, sentences, point of view, and word choice. Following this section is an Information Literacy section that covers finding high quality texts and how to avoid plagiarism. The remainder of the textbook gives instruction in writing by explaining why we write, considering audience and purpose in writing, understanding the writing process, and citing sources correctly. Within this section is instruction on developing good writing habits and overcoming obstacles such as writing anxiety and procrastination. The book concludes with a section on grammar and MLA style. The content is comprehensive, but brief in comparison to other textbooks on similar topics. I suspect the brevity is intentional, as the audience for this textbook appears to be those who need a primer to college level reading and writing. Most topics range from just one to three pages long. The Table of Contents is detailed; there is a glossary of important terms; there is no index.

I did not find any errors or signs of author bias in this text.

The content of the textbook is up-to-date. Writers are intentional about using gender neutral language and representing all people equally. There is a website that accompanies this textbook (http://theword4instructors.wordpress.com) that has a section titled "Resources for Class." This has a few helpful resources, but appears to be a work in progress. The authors are aware of how often online links change, so instead of providing links to suggested supplementary resources, they suggest searching for particular titles or key words on the internet. The search terms they provided helped me arrive at the correct materials.

The content is extremely accessible to beginning college learners. Technical terms are always defined and examples are given. "Check Your Understanding" sections are incorporated so learners can pause to determine whether they are grasping the content. "Exercises" are suggested to help students apply the content they've been reading about.

The text has consistent format and a framework that is easy to follow.

The sections are short; many are just 1 to 3 pages long. This makes content easily digestible for those who are still learning foundational reading and writing skills. Subheadings and bulleted lists are used to break up longer sections of text.

The topics are presented in a clear, logical manner that is consistent with similar textbooks commonly used for this subject.

The book uses consistent graphics to accompany features, such as "Exercises," "Pro-Tips," and "Check Your Understanding." Other images integrated into the textbook display properly.

The text appeared to be error-free.

No instances of culturally insensitive or offensive material were found. Images used include a variety of races and ages.

The authors have created a text that is easily comprehensible for adult learners who need to build their reading and writing skills in order to be successful in college. It is user-friendly, easy to understand, and gets the reader engaged in the text. The only suggestion I have is to include an APA section in addition to, or alongside of, the MLA section.

Reviewed by Brian Leingang, Associate Professor of English, Edison State Community College on 10/4/18

The Word covers all the necessary areas for a first year writing class and beginning writers. This book appealed to our department because our former textbooks were essay anthologies and not a book dedicated solely to writing. We like for students to read a variety of writing and to study what the authors are doing and how they produce effective writing. The Word contains links to recently published essays about things students might be interested in, such as food and technology. Many of the linked essays appear with lessons on reading and rhetoric while saving short writing examples written by the authors as a way to demonstrate specific writing strategies in the "Responding to Texts" and "Drafting" sections. This is helpful because it allows students to see the different ways the same thing can be written/said. There is a glossary contained in the appendices. There is no index, but the search function makes up for the lack of index. If this were to be downloaded and printed, the lack of index might pose some difficulties when looking for something very specific. But, the table of contents lists every section, so it is pretty easy to find all of the information.

The content in The Word is similar to any other writing textbook or writing website when it comes to the fundamentals of writing (i.e. rhetoric, the writing process, revising, etc.). What makes this text stand out are the first two sections "Working with Texts" and "Writing about Texts," which provide students with clear strategies for becoming better readers and thinkers. There are links to many different articles that help students learn to read and respond to complicated texts. It offers a variety examples rather than templates.

The content appears to be relevant. There aren't references to pop culture that will become dated in a few months or years (such as mentioning fidget spinners or "dabbing"). There are some references to the film "The Hunger Games," which is used to demonstrate different ways to write a thesis, but there are also references to other types of papers students might write for other disciplines, such as art history. Overall, the book should hold up well for several years. I do have a concern about the links to some of the external readings and whether they will hold up. I had issue with one link being broken when I was reviewing the text for adoption, but the link works now, so it appears that the authors check on the text regularly.

It's easy to read and fits the way I teach. There are many short imagined assignment examples to demonstrate various writing techniques, which can help students visualize what they are going to do in their paper. There is a glossary of terms in the appendices, but they authors take care to explain these terms in the chapters, too.

This book is consistent. Despite having several authors, the textbook reads in a single voice.

Many of the chapters are short and make for great mini-lessons that coincide with other writing assignments in the course. It isn't necessary to start with chapter 1. The textbook offers two sections on reading and responding to texts before discussing some of the fundamentals of rhetoric and the writing process. This makes skipping around in the book easy to do. When printed, the book is 185 pages long, so it's pretty easy to get through in a semester. Since this book appears to be written for a first year student, some of the material can even be assigned as a review for most writers coming straight out of high school. Since this book is used at a community college with students of varying ages, from students still in high school to students eligible for AARP membership, this book serves our population well.

The Word flows well and would be a great book for a new instructor to use for a first class. It's a book that can be followed from beginning to end without requiring the instructor add supplemental content. It might surprise some students to see that the first two sections are about reading rather than writing, but most college students are going to be using their writing to respond to what they read. So, it makes sense. There are plenty of exercises and writing assignments throughout the book, which instructors can skip or include. Some of the exercises can be hit or miss. For example, when going over the "Audience" section, there is an exercise where students are to write to a variety of different audiences to ask for $100. It's a great premise, to assign a purpose and an audience, but the audiences are particularly difficult to write for. Many students said they wouldn't ask any one for the money because they felt bad about it. Overall, the content flows well from one section to the next.

The text is easy to read and navigate online through web browsers. There are no problems using it on a Mac with Safari or Firefox on a PC. It is necessary to make sure the window is large enough so the table of contents doesn't overlap the text on the page.

Being a writing textbook, there should be few (if any) errors. I did find one word choice error with the use of "peak" instead of "pique," but I feel comfortable contacting the authors to address this.

This book is culturally sensitive. It does present people of different races, cultures, and sexuality, though I am not sure if it is equally representative of presenting people of different abilities. For instance, the exercise about writing for a purpose and audience (the "give me a $100 letter) includes just about every group imaginable except for people with disabilities. The "Patterns of Organization and Methods of Development of Ideas" chapter has an exercise that asks students to practice opening statements for an imagined writing assignment, which include writing topics about "gender roles", "toxic masculinity", and "race relations" to show that the textbook allows and encourages those types of discussions. I did not see a section on gender neutral or non-sexist language in the book, but the book does provide plenty examples of gender neutral writing. I feel the authors deliberately tried to avoid confrontation of sensitive topics in their reading assignments and writing examples in order to allow the students to focus on the material. This doesn't mean students and instructors can't bring these topics up.

Reviewed by Lucas Street, Director of the Reading/Writing Center and Instructor of English, Augustana College on 6/19/18

A good introduction to college reading/writing, especially useful for first-year students. While some of the subsections are a bit short, there’s good breadth here. The focus seems to be on what students most need to know and presenting an array of reading/writing strategies rather than going into depth on each one. However, The Word also includes a number of useful strategies and tips I’ve not seen in other, similar texts.

There’s no index, and the glossary is quite short. Occasionally the text refers readers to the glossary for further information but no such entry appears.

The text supplies pragmatic strategies most often based on best practices in composition theory, and it does a good job concisely explaining the reasons why reading/writing/info literacy skills are important, as well as the logic behind what can sometimes seem to first-year college students like arbitrary rules.

I quibbled with a few minor details, especially in the “Learning About Plagiarism” section, but overall I found this text very accurate.

This text is quite up-to-date. It uses contemporary examples and articles that should be relevant for years to come.

The examples of non-credible websites linked to in the “information literacy” section, though, are quite dated--one can tell at first glance that these sites are problematic without having to think too hard about it.

Clarity seems to be a priority here. The style is lucid and truly student-directed. It does an excellent job making terminology from the field (e.g., “rhetoric,” “recursive”) accessible. Paragraphs are typically pretty short, and the text is well-formatted with headings, bullets, etc.

I didn’t notice any issues with consistency. The many internal links from one section to another help unite the text.

The text employs cross-referencing via internal links, but is not overly self-referential. The main sections work well as units, although subsection or “chapter” length in the eBook varies widely--from a few paragraphs to multiple pages’ worth of text. It would be nice if these were a bit more uniform.

The book proceeds logically, beginning with reading strategies, proceeding to information literacy, and finally sections for each part of the writing process. The organization also allows for modular or non-linear reading.

The interface is excellent. Both the online and PDF versions boast a clean, attractive layout. Images, links, and other embedded content such as videos make this an easy read. The eBook interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, with attention to visual accessibility (i.e., an always-present option to increase font size).

As it relies on a conversational style, this text employs sentence fragments throughout--but not so many as to be distracting. I noticed a handful of very small “errors” that either don’t affect comprehension or could actually improve it.

Gender-inclusive language is used throughout. Examples are likewise inclusive of a variety of races and sexual orientations.

Clear, accessible, well-designed, and up-to-date, The Word... is an excellent primer on college reading and writing. I plan to use much of it in my first-year composition classes.

Reviewed by Farah Marklevits, Assistant Director, The Reading/Writing Center, Augustana College on 6/19/18

Including and starting with reading is an excellent, much-needed approach to introduce students in how to think critically and write effectively for academic audiences. The portion on writing is comprehensive, clearly organized, and directed to clear contexts across the curriculum. The reading portion is less comprehensive and focused. I would have liked to see more specific guidance on setting and annotating for different academic purposes, reading rhetorically, and more strategies for reading difficult texts.

Overall, the text makes few errors in content. Though sources are acknowledged, footnotes rather than a Works Cited may have been more appropriate for navigation.

The text seems relevant now and the reading/writing advice seems like it will largely stand. The external links all seem to work. However, exercise directions make good use of externally linked texts so editing more than just updating external links might be needed to keep the text up-to-date.

I appreciated the rationale for many key moves and habits and the explanation of key terms. I also appreciated the accessible, warm but authoritative tone. This tone was especially effective in the writing pages that address anxiety, writer’s block, and writing habits. Purpose and application of some reading pages is unclear, such as sentence-level and paragraph analysis.

Consistently refers to writing as a recursive process driven by purpose and audience, emphasizes revision and feedback in terms of higher order concerns, and refers to texts as not just written/printed work.

Organization of online text into parts, titles, subtitles, and sub-subtitles cuts this text into bite-sized pieces makes the text seem easy to select from and use in various ways.

Having a clear sense of where you are in the organization of the text is a bit tricky. Though each chapter is listed in the drop-down table of contents (for example, there are no pages devoted to the chapter’s title, so you can link to the chapter title. The chapter title is included on each page, but it’s so small compared with the page title that it becomes easy to lose track of the overarching topic.

The online text does a good job of including and suggesting links back to pages that can give relevant advice and/or answer questions, something especially useful to reinforce the point that reading and writing are interrelated, recursive processes. The PDF versions have a lot of empty space in margins with page numbers only for odd numbers, which makes it potentially inefficient or awkward to read in print.

There are occasional typos, but, overall, few mistakes.

Leads with a discussion of gender pronoun use and makes some effort toward diverse representation in examples. However, misses an opportunity to discuss cultural influences on voice and style.

Reviewed by Claudia Hutchison, Adjunct Professor, Portland Community College on 6/19/18

Introduced as “a handy guide” for all college reading and writing assignments, this text thoroughly addresses the vital aspects of reading comprehension and expository writing. It also touches on effective study habits and student success skills. The text provides clear, concise explanations with helpful examples, illustrations, short discussions, and “check yourself” exercises. The Appendices and the Glossary are useful. The “Resources for Working with MLA” and “Creating a Works Cited Page” appendices offer condensed, clear instructions with easy to understand annotated examples. In the “Grammar and Style” appendix, the authors point out that their text is not a grammar and style handbook, and thus they pare down to the basics with Top Ten Errors. Their list demonstrates the depth of their teaching experience. The Glossary includes current terms such as zine, OER’s, and intellectual property.

The text is free from grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, or any other impediments. The sentences are well-phrased; the information is accurate and up-to-date.

The text uses contemporary resources that appeal to students, such as websites, blogs, and videos. It also cites classical literature, which will always be relevant in college studies. The articles in sources such as the New York Times Magazine and Scientific American blog site address concerns that are timely yet unlikely to become quickly outdated. The skills imparted in the section “Writing about Texts” – such as reading critically, dialectic note-taking, summarizing, and critiquing, are relevant not only to college composition courses but also to writing assignments in other disciplines. The same could be said for the section on “Information Literacy.” The organization and the modularity of this text will facilitate updating and amending.

The writing is clear and exact. I did not find anything vague or confusing. The word choice and the sentence structure add to the feeling of accessibility. The tone and the approach are appropriate for the intended audience. Beginning the section “Tone, Voice, and Point of View” with an example of a greeting, “Yo! Wass up?” illustrates the authors’ skill in engaging students while providing adequate content.

The text is consistent throughout in its tone, vocabulary level, and exposition. The concepts build logically from one to the next. The relaxed, conversational style of writing makes the text feel approachable

The sections of this text do not necessarily need to be followed in the order presented. An instructor could choose or rearrange them to fit his/her course syllabus. The section devoted to reading comprehension skills could be used in a college preparation course or seminar.

Section titles, chapter heads and subheads are all clear and logically arranged. I did wonder about the placement of the section Information Literacy, which might more logically come before “Writing about Texts” instead of interrupting the writing sequence. The text uses two color and occasionally three-color pages effectively.

The many links I tried all worked. I am not aware of any problems with the interface or distortions of graphics. The on-line navigation is trouble-free.

The text is free from grammatical errors,

The text appeals to the broad audience of college freshmen.. Literature and articles cited represent a wide range of writers. The photos of the individuals used in the exercises in the section “Determining your audience” represent diversity in age, career, and ethnicity.

This textbook offers the basic reading, writing, and study skills college freshmen need to master for successful higher education. Much of its material is well suited for developmental reading and writing courses. The text can also be useful throughout one’s college career as a referral resource when writing papers for courses in all disciplines. The authors accurately describe their work as a “use as you need it” text. I am especially happy to see that the section on Building Strong Reading Skills does not emphasize reading speed. Explanations and examples are clear and useful. The description of “Ethos, Pathos, and Logos” is one of the best I’ve come across.

Reviewed by Phoebe Reeves, Associate Professor, University of Cincinnati, Clermont College on 3/27/18

Succinctly and with adequate explanations/exercises/examples, this text covers all the basics. I like that it keeps a tight focus on these basics, and doesn't try to do everything (ie, it doesn't get deeply into research writing or argumentative... read more

The text reads as very accurate, professional, and error-free.

The rhetorical content is pretty timeless, while the examples like links to external websites for reading or exercises are contemporary--but would be easy to update.

This text is written in precise and clear language, but still maintains an approachable tone that I think would be very welcoming for a freshman composition student.

Tone, vocabulary, and approach are consistent.

I'm not used to thinking about a textbook in this way, but yes, I think a teacher could easily excerpt parts as they fit into her syllabus, or re-arrange sections, without losing the integrity of the text.

The order of topics made sense to me, starting with reading, moving to writing about reading, and then digging into the more complex topics of sustained writing projects. I also like the way the "Back Matter" is organized, and what topics the authors chose to put there, rather than in the body of the text.

I did not encounter any interface issues or errors and all the links to external websites were functional and up-to-date.

I did not find any errors or typos.

I was pleased to see a discussion of pronouns right at the beginning-well done on that front!

The external links are an interesting way to expand the reach of the text, and I thought they were all well-chosen. The websites used in discussing how to evaluate a source were hilarious and very effective ways to facilitate that discussion (the Di-hydrogen Monoxide one, in particular).

I will seriously consider using this text in my freshman composition class.

Reviewed by Stefanie Lauer, GSW Dual Enrollment Professor, Bowling Green State University on 2/1/18

Not only does this book provide a comprehensive coverage of the entire subject of the differences between high school and college reading and writing, it also gives examples, short discussion questions, and quizzes to check comprehension. It is split into distinct reading and writing categories, which each include subtopics underneath and all are appropriately and adequately addressed.

I found no content to be biased, and it all appeared error-free. It appears as though the author has conducted extensive research in order to give many different examples on the same topic.

I think the content does a nice job of staying up to date while still discussing past practices that are relevant today. I do not feel like it will become obsolete any time soon. If it were to, it would be easy enough to add updates, without completely altering any part of it.

Perhaps this is one of the best features of the book because all of the content is discussed in a way that a student could easily understand on their own, while

The formatting, terminology, and content is all consistent throughout the entire textbook. As a reader, and teacher, it is easy to understand what is coming next, and to scaffold from one idea to the next.

The text does a great job of this by using multiple chapter titles, and then headings and subheadings underneath that. Each section is differentiated with consistent formatting that allow the user to know they are transitioning to a new section. In terms of technical writing, this book does a stellar job. There are also helpful “check your understanding” questions/discussions at the end of each section, which would prove useful if assigning small parts for homework or added discussion.

Not only does the modularity of this book work, but the organization does as well because each idea seems to build onto another. They start out discussing titles, before going into notetaking at a further point in the book. It is in the order that a student would be analyzing any text they encounter, and this organization would prove useful to teacher and student.

I was actually surprised at how well the interface is setup for this being an online book. Sometimes with the open book library I am afraid of students scrolling too fast, or not going far enough, and missing important content. However, the navigation of this book seems to be one of its strengths because it’s not afraid to leave white space, which helps signal a new topic is up ahead, compared to some other online texts that try to group too many topics onto one page.

While simplistic at times, they are accurate in terms of grammar. I enjoyed the simplicity of different parts of this book because I felt like it could reach even the most basic of audiences, while still holding them to a high academic standard in terms of content.

I had some of my students and coworkers skim over different sections I picked out to try to remain as unbiased and impartial as I could for this section. We all agreed that the examples given could be applicable to multiple different students, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or background.

Overall, this is one of the most engaging, easy to access open textbooks that I have encountered thus far. I’m excited to start including even more of it in my classrooms.

Reviewed by Tara Coleman, Assistant Professor, LaGuardia Community College on 2/1/18

The book covers all of the important features of the reading and writing process, including a few sections, like the one on information Literacy and Giving and Receiving Feedback, which are important to how many of us teach writing but are not often explicitly addressed in such handbooks. There is no index, though the table of contents gives a pretty clear idea of the structure of the book and the content of each section. There is a glossary with some key terms defined, though it could be more comprehensive. Personally, I would prefer a more extensive section on grammar than the brief overview provided here, because then I could use this book exclusively.

The content is accurate based on current trends and best practices in the field. Though there are some points and pieces of advice I would disagree with, they are a matter of opinion and debate among writing instructors, and the textbook often acknowledges areas where some instructors may not share the same approach, emphasizing at several points that if students have questions they should consult their instructor.

The content provides relevant examples using articles on current issues or cultural references that would be familiar to students, but none of these will be quickly obsolete and more importantly, the main content does not rely on these examples, so it is easy to swap out one article or example for another.

The book is written in accessible language that students can easily understand, and uses a more casual tone than the typical textbook, in an attempt to seem less formidable to students. There are also attempts at humor which the students will appreciate even if they find it a bit cheesy.

The book is highly consistent and includes many links or references to other sections which will enable students to cross-reference and consult other sections for more detail on a particular point.

The units are broken down in such a way as to be easily presented independently, while at the same time, references to other sections are made, allowing students to read in more depth if they choose to. The only comment I have here is that sometimes, especially in the first half on reading, the sections seemed a bit too condensed. A point would be made, followed by an example, and then the section ends, without any further explanation of how that example supports the point. I appreciate brevity but sometimes my students are not that good at making these kinds of inferences.

It is very well-organized and easy to read while still going into enough detail on most topics.

The interface worked perfectly on my laptop. When I read it on my mobile phone (as many of my students will do) some of the pages presented with the text extending beyond the edge of the screen, so that I had to shrink the size of the page so that the text fit the screen, which made the text quite small and difficult to read. This only happened sporadically, so it seems to be a technical glitch. It would be wonderful to have a way to make notes on a page or bookmark it so that students can identify key sections they will refer back to.

There were no grammatical errors that I noticed. There were a few paragraphs missing a period at the end.

I did not notice any instances of cultural insensitivity or offensiveness. I thought that the examples were fairly neutral, though the book didn't necessarily go out of its way to be inclusive.

I think it is a great textbook which I plan to use in my upcoming composition course.

Reviewed by Kris Lowrey, Instructor, Virginia Commonwealth University on 2/1/18

This text provides a solid introduction to both the reading and writing skills that students would need as they begin their university studies. It has a helpful glossary, and while there is no index, the table of contents is sufficiently detailed... read more

The book is largely accurate, and the content seems to be presented in an appropriately unbiased way.

I think that this book will continue to be relevant with little need for updating for the foreseeable future. Because the book primarily focuses on the development of skills rather than content, it would be relatively easy to implement.

The text is largely accessible to the average incoming college student. It provides clear context and explanations for the student without utilizing too much jargon or specialized terminology. It is a bit text-heavy, which might be intimidating for a student with weaker reading skills.

Vocabulary is used consistently throughout. The chapter layouts are also consistent, which helps to contribute to the easy of using this textbook.

One of the strengths of this book is that it would work equally well as a complete text or divided into smaller units. While the chapters build on themselves, they're also very useful as standalone products. This book could easily be used in a variety of contexts with a great deal of success.

The topics for each chapter are logically organized and coherent, The book has achieved an appropriate balance between providing enough information to support the readers while also not losing sight of the big picture.

The book's display is overall very pleasing. The images and graphics used add to the professional presentation and interest of the book; they aren't a distraction. The .pdf version of the file seems to have a small problem with pagination, but overall it is visually very pleasing.

The text contains no known grammatical errors.

The textbook is not culturally insensitive or offensive. The example readings used are largely homogeneous, so someone teaching with this textbook would likely want to bring in examples from more diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Reviewed by Joseph Szpila, Adjunct Professor, Rhoce Island College on 2/1/18

THE WORD ON COLLEGE READING AND WRITING provides a strong overview of the reading and writing process for, in particular, a target audience of freshman- and sophomore-level college students or those attending a community college. The text is... read more

The text is divided into two main sections. Part I gives advice on building strong reading skills, provides methods of effectively writing about texts, and notes the importance of information literacy in the modern workplace.

Part II begins by establishing the rationale for devloping strong written communication skills and then provides logical coverge of standard ideas surrounding the importance of determining audience and purpose for writing. This is followed by sections exploring methods of generating ideas (freewriting, brainstorming, clustering and the like), drafting and revising, and editing. Part II goes on to cover the eesentials of using sources correctly and concludes with good advice on overcoming obstacles to writing (such a writer's block and anxiety) and generating good writing habits. Back matter includes sections on grammar and style, working with MLA format (the textbook focuses almost exclusively on MLA), and includes a helpful glossary.

The textbook appears error-free and up-to-date with its advice, even in the area of contemporary MLA source citation using the "core elements" approach in construction of Works Cited entries.

Much of this textbook presents time-honored rhetorical information on reading and writing strategies that will change little despite the influence of technology on information delivery. While the textbook does focus on new methods of information exchange, it does not focus heavily on information-sharing via personal websites, blogs, video poduction and other forms of electronic, internet-based communication on the student writer's part. The focus is squarely on the production of classic essays for the college undergraduate classroom.

I particularly found this textbook admirable for its straightforward, conversational delivery of information. I could easily imagine the tone employed effectively connecting with entry-level college students. As an example:

"Common communication models present a sender (e.g. a writer) and a receiver (e.g. a reader) and different concepts of what happens as information is shared between them. But sometimes the purpose for writing isn’t at all about sending information to some “other” receiver or reader. Sometimes, your purpose for writing might simply be to explore an idea or even just to figure out what you think."

And the following example illustrates this tone employed in describing a common rhetorical pattern of organization:

"The comparison-and-contrast method of development is particularly useful in extending a definition, or anywhere you need to show how a subject is like or unlike another subject. For example, the statement is often made that drug abuse is a medical problem instead of a criminal justice issue. An author might attempt to prove this point by comparing drug addiction to AIDS, cancer, or heart disease to redefine the term “addiction” as a medical problem. A statement in opposition to this idea could just as easily establish contrast by explaining all the ways that addiction is different from what we traditionally understand as an illness."

The Glossary provides definitions of those few terms ("Empiric disciplines," "Intellectual property" and the like) the target-level student might require.

THE WORD ON COLLEGE READING AND WRITING uses a conversational style carried consistently throughout. The impression is that of a coach offering his listener sound advice in a friendly, helpful, nonjudgmental demeanor. And potentially confusing terminology is clearly explained in easy-to-understand language. As an example:

"Pathos is the fastest way to get your audience’s attention. People tend to have emotional responses before their brains kick in and tell them to knock it off. Be careful though. Too much pathos can make your audience feel emotionally manipulated or angry because they’re also looking for the facts to support whatever emotional claims you might be making so they know they can trust you."

As the writers themselves state, this is a "use-it-as-you-need" kind of text. And they're right. This text could easily serve as a handbook for an introduction to college writing class or as the core text itself. Its divisional strategy would make it ideal for focusing on specific writing tasks or to troubleshoot specific areas for improvement. Indeed, one of its most attractive qualities would be its adaptability. The text is logically organized with ample divisional headings and navigational cues, as well as appropriate graphic accompaniments, illustrations and photos. It's visually appealing and simple to digest.

Opening with an emphasis on the essential relationship between reading and writing and on the importance of building strong reading skills, the book proceeds in a logical order to cover the rationale for writing about texts in a college environment (and, subsequently, the workplace) and then provides strategies for doing so, definitely geared to an entry-level college student.

The text is simple to navigate and even rewards skimming for a casual reader simply interested in improving as a writer. I particulalry liked the manner in which the book uses links to articles and outside source materials external to the textbook itself that students can access immediately, as in the following example:

"Here’s an example article from the New York Times, “Monks Embrace Web to Reach Recruits,” that highlights an unexpected approach by a group of Benedictine monks in Rhode Island; they’ve turned to social media to grow their dwindling membership. Monks on Facebook? Who knew?"

The textbook makes frequent use of external contemporary sources such as this to illustrate rhetorical points. Of course, the potential drawback surrounding such online source material might be the reliability of its availability into the future.

My reading came across just a few editorial typos in the book. ("Th New York times," for example.)

While the main focus of the book is not that of a multicultural reader, it does draw some examples from a diverse perspective, as in the following: "Here’s an example article from the New York Times: “Who Wants to Shop in a Big Box Store, Anyway?” The author explores some interesting differences between the average American and average Indian consumer to contemplate the potential success of big box stores in India and also to contemplate why these giant big box corporations, like Walmart or Target, might have to rethink their business model." The book is in no way culturally insensitive or offensive, though its major focus is not on issues of ethnicity or diverse background. The target student reader here is somewhat generic.

I was impressed by this book and feel it would work well in many freshmen-level writing classrooms. One gets the feeling that it was written by instructors with considerable practical experience in dealing realistically with novice college student writers. I particularly enjoyed the various links the text uses to illustrate its concepts, and often the links are employed across several concurrent actiities to effectivly illustrate a writing process. (In fact, I would even like to see more of this tactic used.) An example:

"Using the same article as in the “Paraphrasing” section (see the section just before this one), written by Sarah Boxer and published online in The Atlantic, I’m going to quote just the third sentence of the passage we looked at in the paraphrasing activity: “Because not everyone who wants the experience actually gets the experience, these works, even if their intentions and messages are democratic, tend to become exclusive affairs.”

Which of these uses of that sentence would be a correct way to use it as a quote in my own essay?"

The text then provides several options to choose from.

I did notice that many of the examples in the opening section (Part I) of the textbook are literary, and many were somewhat older fictional references (Hemingway, Salinger, Ray Bradbury...). My initial impression was that this might be a good textbook to use for a class focused on literary analysis or the like. But the literary focus was not as predominant in Part II.

Overall, I am impressed by this book,and will definitely consider using this it in a future first-year writing class.

Introduction Part 1: Working with Texts

What is a Text?

Building Strong Reading Skills

Read Effectively
Create an Optimal Setting for Reading
Use Pre-reading Strategies
Read Efficiently
Annotate and Take Notes
Do Quick Research
Discover What a Text is Trying to Say
Explore the Ways the Text Affects You
Troubleshoot Your Reading

Writing about Texts

Reading Critically
Exploring the Structure of a Text
Dialectic Note-taking
Analyzing Content and Rhetoric
Sentence-Level Analysis
Point of View
Word Choice
Paragraph Analysis
Summarizing a Text
Critiquing a Text
Drawing Conclusions, Synthesizing, and Reflecting

What is Information Literacy?

Why is Information Literacy Important?
Finding Quality Texts
Learning About Plagiarism and Guidelines for Using Information

Part 2: Writing

About This Section
Self-Exploration and Self-Enrichment
Comprehension and Academic Performance
Professional Opportunities
Effective Communication and Persuasion

Determining Your Audience and Purpose

Appealing to Your Audience
Tone, Voice, and Point of View

Prewriting—Generating Ideas

Selecting and Narrowing a Topic
Strategies for Getting Started
Imagining Your Audience's Needs
Organizing Your Ideas and Looking for Connections
Finding the Thesis
Writing a First Draft
Writing Paragraphs
The Paragraph Body: Supporting Your Ideas
Developing Relationships between Ideas
Patterns of Organization and Methods of Development
Writing Introductions
Writing Conclusions
Writing Summaries
Paraphrasing

Using Sources Correctly

Crediting and Citing Your Sources
Citing: Identifying In-Text Sources
Citing or Identifying Images in Your Writing
Handling Titles
Proofreading Your Work with Sources
Using Citation Generators

Dealing with Obstacles and Developing Good Habits

Overcoming Writing Anxiety and Writer's Block
Good Writing Habits
Procrastination
Higher vs. Lower Order Concerns
Reverse Outlining
Document Format, Documentation Style, and Proofreading
Giving and Receiving Feedback
What's Next?

Appendices Grammar and Style Resources for Working with MLA Creating a Works Cited Page Results for the "Check Your Understanding" Activities Glossary of Terms Works Cited in This Text

Ancillary Material

About the book.

Written by five college reading and writing instructors, this interactive, multimedia text draws from decades of experience teaching students who are entering the college reading and writing environment for the very first time. It includes examples, exercises, and definitions for just about every reading- and writing-related topic students will encounter in their college courses.

About the Contributors

Monique Babin, Instructional Designer in Portland, Oregon

Carol Burnell, Faculty Member in the English department at Clackamas Community College, Oregon City

Susan Pesznecker , Adjunct Instructor in the English department at Clackamas Community College, Oregon City

Nicole Rosevear , Faculty Member in the English department at Clackamas Community College, Oregon City

Jaime Wood , Program Manager for Educational Initiatives at Portland State University, Portland

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The four main types of essay | Quick guide with examples

The Four Main Types of Essay | Quick Guide with Examples

Published on September 4, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An essay is a focused piece of writing designed to inform or persuade. There are many different types of essay, but they are often defined in four categories: argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive essays.

Argumentative and expository essays are focused on conveying information and making clear points, while narrative and descriptive essays are about exercising creativity and writing in an interesting way. At university level, argumentative essays are the most common type.

Essay type	Skills tested	Example prompt
		Has the rise of the internet had a positive or negative impact on education?
		Explain how the invention of the printing press changed European society in the 15th century.
		Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself.
		Describe an object that has sentimental value for you.

In high school and college, you will also often have to write textual analysis essays, which test your skills in close reading and interpretation.

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Argumentative essays, expository essays, narrative essays, descriptive essays, textual analysis essays, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about types of essays.

An argumentative essay presents an extended, evidence-based argument. It requires a strong thesis statement —a clearly defined stance on your topic. Your aim is to convince the reader of your thesis using evidence (such as quotations ) and analysis.

Argumentative essays test your ability to research and present your own position on a topic. This is the most common type of essay at college level—most papers you write will involve some kind of argumentation.

The essay is divided into an introduction, body, and conclusion:

The introduction provides your topic and thesis statement
The body presents your evidence and arguments
The conclusion summarizes your argument and emphasizes its importance

The example below is a paragraph from the body of an argumentative essay about the effects of the internet on education. Mouse over it to learn more.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

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An expository essay provides a clear, focused explanation of a topic. It doesn’t require an original argument, just a balanced and well-organized view of the topic.

Expository essays test your familiarity with a topic and your ability to organize and convey information. They are commonly assigned at high school or in exam questions at college level.

The introduction of an expository essay states your topic and provides some general background, the body presents the details, and the conclusion summarizes the information presented.

A typical body paragraph from an expository essay about the invention of the printing press is shown below. Mouse over it to learn more.

The invention of the printing press in 1440 changed this situation dramatically. Johannes Gutenberg, who had worked as a goldsmith, used his knowledge of metals in the design of the press. He made his type from an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, whose durability allowed for the reliable production of high-quality books. This new technology allowed texts to be reproduced and disseminated on a much larger scale than was previously possible. The Gutenberg Bible appeared in the 1450s, and a large number of printing presses sprang up across the continent in the following decades. Gutenberg’s invention rapidly transformed cultural production in Europe; among other things, it would lead to the Protestant Reformation.

A narrative essay is one that tells a story. This is usually a story about a personal experience you had, but it may also be an imaginative exploration of something you have not experienced.

Narrative essays test your ability to build up a narrative in an engaging, well-structured way. They are much more personal and creative than other kinds of academic writing . Writing a personal statement for an application requires the same skills as a narrative essay.

A narrative essay isn’t strictly divided into introduction, body, and conclusion, but it should still begin by setting up the narrative and finish by expressing the point of the story—what you learned from your experience, or why it made an impression on you.

Mouse over the example below, a short narrative essay responding to the prompt “Write about an experience where you learned something about yourself,” to explore its structure.

Since elementary school, I have always favored subjects like science and math over the humanities. My instinct was always to think of these subjects as more solid and serious than classes like English. If there was no right answer, I thought, why bother? But recently I had an experience that taught me my academic interests are more flexible than I had thought: I took my first philosophy class.

Before I entered the classroom, I was skeptical. I waited outside with the other students and wondered what exactly philosophy would involve—I really had no idea. I imagined something pretty abstract: long, stilted conversations pondering the meaning of life. But what I got was something quite different.

A young man in jeans, Mr. Jones—“but you can call me Rob”—was far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected. And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, I’d discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones.

The experience has taught me to look at things a little more “philosophically”—and not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught me—in more ways than one—to look at things with an open mind.

A descriptive essay provides a detailed sensory description of something. Like narrative essays, they allow you to be more creative than most academic writing, but they are more tightly focused than narrative essays. You might describe a specific place or object, rather than telling a whole story.

Descriptive essays test your ability to use language creatively, making striking word choices to convey a memorable picture of what you’re describing.

A descriptive essay can be quite loosely structured, though it should usually begin by introducing the object of your description and end by drawing an overall picture of it. The important thing is to use careful word choices and figurative language to create an original description of your object.

Mouse over the example below, a response to the prompt “Describe a place you love to spend time in,” to learn more about descriptive essays.

On Sunday afternoons I like to spend my time in the garden behind my house. The garden is narrow but long, a corridor of green extending from the back of the house, and I sit on a lawn chair at the far end to read and relax. I am in my small peaceful paradise: the shade of the tree, the feel of the grass on my feet, the gentle activity of the fish in the pond beside me.

My cat crosses the garden nimbly and leaps onto the fence to survey it from above. From his perch he can watch over his little kingdom and keep an eye on the neighbours. He does this until the barking of next door’s dog scares him from his post and he bolts for the cat flap to govern from the safety of the kitchen.

With that, I am left alone with the fish, whose whole world is the pond by my feet. The fish explore the pond every day as if for the first time, prodding and inspecting every stone. I sometimes feel the same about sitting here in the garden; I know the place better than anyone, but whenever I return I still feel compelled to pay attention to all its details and novelties—a new bird perched in the tree, the growth of the grass, and the movement of the insects it shelters…

Sitting out in the garden, I feel serene. I feel at home. And yet I always feel there is more to discover. The bounds of my garden may be small, but there is a whole world contained within it, and it is one I will never get tired of inhabiting.

Though every essay type tests your writing skills, some essays also test your ability to read carefully and critically. In a textual analysis essay, you don’t just present information on a topic, but closely analyze a text to explain how it achieves certain effects.

Rhetorical analysis

A rhetorical analysis looks at a persuasive text (e.g. a speech, an essay, a political cartoon) in terms of the rhetorical devices it uses, and evaluates their effectiveness.

The goal is not to state whether you agree with the author’s argument but to look at how they have constructed it.

The introduction of a rhetorical analysis presents the text, some background information, and your thesis statement; the body comprises the analysis itself; and the conclusion wraps up your analysis of the text, emphasizing its relevance to broader concerns.

The example below is from a rhetorical analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech . Mouse over it to learn more.

King’s speech is infused with prophetic language throughout. Even before the famous “dream” part of the speech, King’s language consistently strikes a prophetic tone. He refers to the Lincoln Memorial as a “hallowed spot” and speaks of rising “from the dark and desolate valley of segregation” to “make justice a reality for all of God’s children.” The assumption of this prophetic voice constitutes the text’s strongest ethical appeal; after linking himself with political figures like Lincoln and the Founding Fathers, King’s ethos adopts a distinctly religious tone, recalling Biblical prophets and preachers of change from across history. This adds significant force to his words; standing before an audience of hundreds of thousands, he states not just what the future should be, but what it will be: “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.” This warning is almost apocalyptic in tone, though it concludes with the positive image of the “bright day of justice.” The power of King’s rhetoric thus stems not only from the pathos of his vision of a brighter future, but from the ethos of the prophetic voice he adopts in expressing this vision.

Literary analysis

A literary analysis essay presents a close reading of a work of literature—e.g. a poem or novel—to explore the choices made by the author and how they help to convey the text’s theme. It is not simply a book report or a review, but an in-depth interpretation of the text.

Literary analysis looks at things like setting, characters, themes, and figurative language. The goal is to closely analyze what the author conveys and how.

The introduction of a literary analysis essay presents the text and background, and provides your thesis statement; the body consists of close readings of the text with quotations and analysis in support of your argument; and the conclusion emphasizes what your approach tells us about the text.

Mouse over the example below, the introduction to a literary analysis essay on Frankenstein , to learn more.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

Ad hominem fallacy
Post hoc fallacy
Appeal to authority fallacy
False cause fallacy
Sunk cost fallacy

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At high school and in composition classes at university, you’ll often be told to write a specific type of essay , but you might also just be given prompts.

Look for keywords in these prompts that suggest a certain approach: The word “explain” suggests you should write an expository essay , while the word “describe” implies a descriptive essay . An argumentative essay might be prompted with the word “assess” or “argue.”

The vast majority of essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Almost all academic writing involves building up an argument, though other types of essay might be assigned in composition classes.

Essays can present arguments about all kinds of different topics. For example:

In a literary analysis essay, you might make an argument for a specific interpretation of a text
In a history essay, you might present an argument for the importance of a particular event
In a politics essay, you might argue for the validity of a certain political theory

An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

The key difference is that a narrative essay is designed to tell a complete story, while a descriptive essay is meant to convey an intense description of a particular place, object, or concept.

Narrative and descriptive essays both allow you to write more personally and creatively than other kinds of essays , and similar writing skills can apply to both.

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Caulfield, J. (2023, July 23). The Four Main Types of Essay | Quick Guide with Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved August 26, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/essay-types/

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The impact of self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and reflection before and after revision on student self-efficacy and writing performance

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Published: 04 July 2021
Volume 34 , pages 1885–1913, ( 2021 )

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post test reading and writing about essays

Huy Q. Chung ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3048-3678 1 ,
Vicky Chen 1 &
Carol Booth Olson 1

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Writing on-demand, text-based analytical essays is a challenging skill to master. Novice writers, such as the sixth grade US students in this study, may lack background knowledge of how to compose an effective essay, the self-efficacy skills, and the goal setting skills that will help with completing this task in accomplished ways. This sequential mixed-method study explored the impact of guiding a predominantly Redesignated English Learner group of students in a large, urban, low-SES school district in a timed, on-demand essay into a multiple draft process paper through a self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and reflection process as they revised this process paper over a three week period. Both treatment and comparison students completed a pre-test on demand writing assessment, a pre and post self-efficacy in writing survey, and a post-test on demand writing assessment. Students in both conditions were participating in a year-long writing intervention called The Pathway to Academic Success, developed and implemented by the UC Irvine site of the National Writing Project (UCI Writing Project), during the 2017–2018 school year and received identical training from their teachers on how to revise a pre-test essay. However, only the treatment group engaged in self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and reflection during this revision process. Students in the treatment condition demonstrated improved self-efficacy in the writing sub-domain of revision ( p < .05) and had statistically significant greater gains on the post-test writing assessment (r = .57; p < .001). These results suggest that engaging students in a planned revision process that includes student reflection, planning, and goal setting before revision, and reflection and self-assessment after revision, positively impacts self-efficacy and writing outcomes.

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Introduction

A person’s self-efficacy, or beliefs about his or her ability to succeed in a specific domain (Bandura, 1997 , 2006 ), plays an important role in both how well a person performs and how long he or she persists at a particular task, especially when the task is complex. Few academic tasks may be as difficult as those required of students in secondary school to demonstrate mastery of the text based analytical writing called for by the Common Core State Standards (Barzilai et al., 2018 ; Biancarosa & Snow, 2004 ; Graham & Perin, 2007 ; National Governors Association, 2010 ; Olson et al., 2012 ). Greater mastery of this skill has been highly correlated with postsecondary success and career readiness (Perin et al., 2017 ). From grade 6 through 12, students are expected to demonstrate increasing complexity as they “write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence” (NGA, 2010 , p. 42). Sub-skills to master this standard include conducting extensive research, discerning fact from opinion, writing a defensible and nuanced claim, organizing essays logically, and revising their papers for clarity.

Recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress for Writing (NCES, 2012) highlight the need to help students become proficient writers, especially in the area of analytical writing and revision which students often find especially challenging (Olson et al., 2012 ). Only about 27% of the nation’s students—and only 1% of English Learners (ELs)—scored proficient or advanced in writing (NCES, 2012 ). This is cause for concern, because being able to write well is an important skill for success in both higher education and the workplace across a variety of disciplines and industries (National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges, 2004 ). Additionally, the achievement gap between our English learners and their English only peers is an issue of equity and access.

ELs represent the fastest growing segment of the K-12 population with the largest increases occurring in grade 7–12 (U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Educational Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, 2017 ). In 2013–14, over 9% of K-12 public school students were ELs. California leads the nation with almost 23% ELs (U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Educational Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, 2016 ). Although ELs in the United States speak more than 350 languages, 73% speak Spanish as their first language (Batalova & McHugh, 2010 ), 40% have origins in Mexico (Hernandez, Denton, & Macartney, 2008 ), and 60% of ELs in grades 6 through 12 come from low-income families (Batalova et al., 2005 ; Capps et al., 2005 ). The largest numbers of ELs in our schools today are referred to as long-term ELs (LTELs) (Menken & Kleyn, 2009 ). According to Olsen ( 2010 ), these are students who have been educated in the United States since age six, are doing poorly in school, and have major gaps in knowledge because their schooling was disrupted. In Olsen’s study of 175,734 ELs, the majority (59%) were LTELs who were failing to acquire academic language and struggling to do well in high school. They may come from homes where the primary language is not English, but they themselves may speak English only or they may switch between multiple languages and still have features in their writing attesting to their multilingual status (Valdés, 2001 ). Limited in their knowledge of academic registers in any language, these students are often mainstreamed into regular English language arts classrooms, though they may be disadvantaged in not only writing skills, but also in soft skills.

One possible contributor to flat-lined scores between administrations of the NAEP-Writing, is the lack of self-efficacy or motivation to perform well on standardized tests for all secondary writers, but particularly for English learners. Kiuhara et al. ( 2009 ) found that students are constrained by more complex essay writing tasks and timed on-demand tasks due to textual, affective, and genre constraints. Students often are either given very brief instructions/prompts, may be unfamiliar with or under-practiced in the genre being assessed, or are overwhelmed by the information given to them in these settings (Blake et al., 2016 ). The fact that students may not know how to approach the writing task or even understand what is expected of them in these situations is a problem that must be addressed. Because text-based analytical writing is a gatekeeper for college access and persistence and a “threshold skill” for hiring and promotion for salaried workers (National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges, 2004 ), failure to close these achievement gaps in academic writing will have serious social and economic consequences. Again, in these circumstances, a student’s self-efficacy plays a large role in completing these tasks.

Self-efficacy is particularly important in completing complex writing tasks. In a study exploring self-efficacy in writing, Pajares and colleagues ( 2007 ) found that how students interpret the results of their own past writing performance, such as how successful they believe they were at completing a writing task, can make a key contribution to their sense of self-efficacy. In fact, Graham and colleagues ( 2018 ) found that students’ beliefs (i.e., sense of self-efficacy) contributed to 10% of the variance in predicting students’ writing outcomes and the percentage is even higher (16.3%) for students with disabilities. On-demand writing, ubiquitous in educational settings, compounds the impact of self-efficacy in writing as students have the added pressure to perform cognitively demanding tasks in a short amount of time that may not mirror the more thoughtful stage process that they are given during regular instruction to take a paper through the writing process, which includes pre-writing, drafting, revising, and editing phases. When students are often asked to revise papers before they submit them for evaluation they are asked to improve their drafts through careful reading and writing that globally impacts their message or purpose for writing the paper. However, few students give themselves enough time to revise their writing during the more intense situations of timed writing assessments. Moreover, even when they do have time to revise their efforts may actually have the opposite effect. Changes they make are constrained by the time they have to reflect on the impact the revision has on the rest of the paper and make more local changes that may or may not help with the overall assessment of the quality of the paper (Worden, 2009 ).

The current study, a sequential mixed methods design study, on testing the impact of self-efficacy in essay writing is an extension of a large-scale intervention called The Pathway to Academic Success, developed and implemented by the UCI Writing Project, that aims to close the achievement gap for English learners in mainstreamed ELA classrooms and their native English speaking peers, particularly in the area of text-based analytical writing by demystifying the process that expert readers and writers use to approach domain-specific tasks, targeting teacher professional development, and fostering students’ habits of mind. By focusing on students’ self-efficacy in writing (SEW) in classroom settings, this work can positively impact teachers’ practices and influence students’ motivation and ability to write analytically. To this end, we focus on answering the following three research questions:

Do students with higher self-efficacy have better writing outcomes?

What is the impact of students’ self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and reflection on their self-efficacy in writing as they revise a text-based analytical essay?

What do students cite as most helpful in revising their writing and how does this contribute to their self-efficacy?

Literature review

The following section reviews the research literature that informs our study. First, we review the concept of self-efficacy in writing to address the first research question. Then, we review the literature on students’ self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and reflection in relation to revision of writing in order to study the second research question. Finally, we discuss factors that are known to impact students’ successful revision of writing such as teacher instruction, motivation, prior knowledge, and conditions of the writing task to explore the third question.

Self-efficacy in writing

As mentioned previously, a person’s self-efficacy, or beliefs about his or her ability to succeed in a specific domain (Bandura, 1997 , 2006 ), influences how anxious people feel, the goals that they set for themselves, and the strategies that they adopt when working towards those goals. A greater sense of self-efficacy tends to correlate with lower levels of anxiety, the use of more effective learning strategies, greater enjoyment of the task, a greater willingness to seek help when needed, and better overall performance (Bong, 2006 ; Sanders-Reio et al., 2014 ; Williams & Takaku, 2011 ).

Pajares and colleagues ( 2007 ) explored Bandura’s ( 1997 ) four hypothesized sources of self-efficacy beliefs—mastery experiences, social persuasion, vicarious experiences, and anxiety—Pajares and colleagues found that, while all four factors were significantly correlated with students’ self-efficacy in writing, perceived mastery experiences were the greatest predictor of writing self-efficacy regardless of gender or grade level. In other words, how students interpret the results of their own past performance, such as how successful they believe they were at completing a similar task, makes a key contribution to their sense of self-efficacy. Although this has led to some interventions that focus on giving praise and encouraging students to evaluate themselves in positive ways as a method of improving self-efficacy, theorists and researchers have increasingly emphasized the importance of concrete skill development and the opportunities that it provides for genuine success experiences (Pajares et al., 2007 ). Such experiences provide powerful support for increasing students’ self-efficacy and equip students with the tools they can use to succeed in future writing tasks.

Self-assessment

Studies which focus on the relationship of students’ self-efficacy on past performance and its impact on future performance have explored a variety of activities and their potential for increasing student self-efficacy in writing. One of the most notable of these is self-assessment, which occurs when people evaluate their own work, identify disparities between their current and desired performance, and reflect upon ways in which they can improve (McMillan & Hearn, 2008 ). Guiding students through this self-reflective process and supporting their development of self-assessment skills gives students a sense of agency and control over their own learning, which, in turn, can heighten student motivation and self-efficacy (Panadero et al., 2016 ). Self-assessment can be conducted and expressed in both spoken (e.g., self-explanation) and/or written form (e.g., reflection); it is conjectured that students who are able to articulate their declarative knowledge around task concepts are better able to convert this knowledge to more tacit, procedural knowledge and skills. Not only does this process influence what students are able to do given a task, but it also influences their experiences and identity work around such tasks, in this case writing (Chi et al., 1989 ). The process of self-assessment also contributes to students’ sense of self-efficacy and conditional knowledge as they engage in reflecting on their own learning, and improvement of their own work. However, it is important to note that student self-assessment is more effective when combined with teacher feedback, especially in domains where students lack expertise (Logan, 2015 ; Panadero et al., 2016 ).

Self-assessment, self-efficacy, and revision

The original Flower-Hayes ( 1981 ) model of the composing process focused on three cognitive processes in writing—planning, translating, and revision–-and discussed them within the context of how an individual writer responds to the task environment, all those factors influencing the writing task, and the writer’s long term memory, including the knowledge of the topic, audience, and stored writing plans. Over fifteen years later, in “A New Framework for Understanding Cognition and Affect in Writing” (Hayes, 1996 ), Hayes reorganized his model to include a social component in the task environment to acknowledge that writing is “a communicative act that requires a social context and a medium” (p. 5). Further, within the individual component of his model, he added motivation/affect under which he lists goals, predispositions, beliefs and attitudes, and cost–benefit analyses because “motivation and affect play central roles in writing processes” (p. 5). He specifically links positive and negative dispositions toward writing to self-assessment and self-efficacy, citing Dweck ( 1986 ) and Palmquist and Young ( 1992 ).

Hayes’ ( 2012 ) new framework also posits an evaluation function responsible for the detection and diagnosis of text problems during revision. He further postulates that to understand revision, it is necessary for writers to draw upon a control structure or task schema that enables them to access a “package of knowledge” that includes: “(i) A goal: to improve the text; (ii) An expected set of activities to perform; (iii) Attentional subgoals; (iv) Templates and criteria for quality; and (v) Strategies for fixing specific text problems” (p. 17). The addition of the control level to Hayes’ composing model indicates that motivation, self-assessment, detection and diagnosis, planning and goal setting, reflection, and writing task schemas all play an important role in students’ self-efficacy as writers. Hayes points out that students who believe writing is a gift rather than a craft one can work at and improve have higher levels of writing anxiety and lower self-assessments of their ability as writers.

In light of Hayes’ new framework, we hypothesize that engaging students in activities that prompt them to detect and diagnose areas for revision, plan and set goals for making both local and, more importantly, global changes (Hayes, 1996 ), and to reflect upon and assess their growth after revising will enhance their self-efficacy as writers and potentially impact their writing outcomes.

Teacher impacts on self-efficacy in writing

Studies have indicated that teachers can play an important role in developing student self-efficacy in writing. Corkett et al. ( 2011 ) found that teachers’ perceptions of students’ self-efficacy in writing are highly correlated with their students’ actual writing performance– indicating that teachers enact different instructional practices based on their perceptions of how prepared their students are for tackling different writing assignments. Their study also found that students’ perceptions of their own abilities are not predictive of their actual abilities, indicating that students still need specific instructional supports to develop their own perceptions of how they can improve their writing.

The nature of how teachers structure a writing task can also impact how certain students develop their self-efficacy in writing. In a study of gifted elementary school children, the treatment group that received formative feedback as they learned and practiced specific writing skills (e.g., topic sentences) and created assigned written products (e.g., a paragraph), better learned these skills and were more proficient at producing certain written products than the comparison group (Schunk & Swartz, 1993 ). However, goal setting and teacher feedback did not improve student self-efficacy with students with learning disabilities (LD) (Sawyer et al., 1992 ). It is conjectured that students with LD tend to overestimate their abilities, as is true for students with general low writing abilities, further necessitating classroom interventions or processes that will help students recognize areas of improvement in their writing and how to improve such skills.

Teachers’ own self-efficacy can also be impacted by teacher professional development (Locke et al., 2013 ) which provides them with more effective and “transformative” ways of teaching writing that can lead to improved student learning and student self-efficacy in writing. However, Locke and colleagues also indicate that teachers’ self-efficacy is moderated by the type of writing their students produce in their classrooms. This feedback loop of student data, teacher interpretation, and reflection on next steps demonstrates the importance of developing both teacher and student self-efficacy in writing.

In sum, studies on teacher self-efficacy and how it interacts with student self-efficacy demonstrate the influence the former has on the latter. Though self-efficacy is often an individual activity, when it comes to writing, input from a teacher influences how well students will approach their own writing tasks. Moreover, teacher self-efficacy beliefs also influence how positive and/or confident teachers themselves feel about teaching writing to students, which again impacts how positive students approach these tasks (Troia & Graham, 2016 ).

Contributing factors to self-efficacy in writing

Beyond teachers, other factors that may impact students’ self-efficacy in writing are their motivation, their prior knowledge around the topic they are writing about, and the conditions under which they are being asked to write. Students who are highly motivated to receive feedback (e.g., help-seeking) on their performance are more likely to do well on writing tasks, indicating that students who are more motivated to improve will produce better writing (Williams & Takaku, 2011 ). Similarly, students are also motivated if they have past success with writing, have been exposed to positive writing habits, have been praised by their peers for their writing, and have associated positive feelings with their writing (Bruning & Kauffman, 2016 ). Students who study for mastery and depth have higher self-efficacy than students who only have surface-level knowledge and have lower self-efficacy because of their motivations and success with past learning experiences (Prat-Sala & Redford, 2010 ). Students also benefit from seeing how other people write and approach writing and self-calibrating to these examples (Schunk & Zimmerman, 2007 ). Moreover, the feedback that they receive around their writing, from both teachers and peers, can impact their self-efficacy. Students tend to internalize the feedback they receive and associate this feedback with whether they are good or bad at writing, along with the emotions that come with these self-assessments (e.g., guilt, confusion, anxiety, or fear) (Smith, 2010 ). Hidi and Boscolo ( 2006 ), for instance, noted that emotions (negative or positive) can serve as a mediating variable between self-efficacy and writing quality. In other words, feeling good while writing is its own reward, and encourages one to see oneself as a good writer and to engage in more writing.

Finally, the context or situation in which students are asked to write can also impact their perceptions of their own self-efficacy. Elementary school students tend to have higher self-efficacy in writing than middle and high school students, and these effects are also stronger for female students across grade levels that report having lower anxiety when it comes to writing tasks (Pajares et al., 2007 ). As expectations increase, the more potential there is for students to feel challenged by these expectations.

Contributions of this study

This study explores the relationship between self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and reflection on self-efficacy in student writing by having students use a revision planner as part of their writing process during a strategy-based reading and writing intervention. The revision planner encourages students to analyze what they did well on a selected piece of writing, with feedback from an experienced reader, quite similar to the mastery experiences Pajares and colleagues ( 2007 ) identified as promoting student self-efficacy in writing. Additionally, beyond identifying the strengths and needs of their writing assignment, students also plan and create achievable goals before revising their essay as well as reflect upon how well they met those goals after revising (McMillan & Hearn, 2008 ). Like a rubric (Andrade et al., 2010 ), a planner can serve as a tool to support students in revising and improving their work. Unlike a rubric, a planner focuses students’ attention on actionable steps that they can take to reach specific goals that they can set for themselves—based upon what they have learned throughout the intervention—to help them manage their revision process and revise their writing successfully. We are particularly interested in the impact that goal setting, supported by the use of a planner, might have on student writing performance, self-assessment, and self-efficacy in writing.

Study context

This sequential mixed methods study took place during the last year of a five-year grant awarded to our institution to validate the effectiveness of a cognitive-strategies approach to writing instruction in partnership with Norwalk La Mirada Unified School District (NLMUSD) and three other school districts in California. The previous four years were spent on designing and conducting a randomized control trial involving the districts’ grade 7 to 12 grade students. During the year we conducted this study (2017–2018), NLMUSD exclusively requested that grade 6 teachers be provided with the same professional development in an effort to institutionalize and scale-up the intervention (Olson et al., 2019). NLMUSD is a large, urban school district that serves 80% Hispanic students, 8% White students, 7% Asian students, 3% African American students, and 2% are Other Ethnicities. Additionally, 61% of their students are English Only students, 17% of their students are English Learners, 16% are Reclassified Fluent English Proficient students, and 6% of their students are Initially English Proficient. About 75% of the district’s students participate in the Federal Reduced Price Lunch program. Participating teachers and students were recruited from NLMUSD specifically as the other three school districts institutionalized the intervention in other ways. Teachers in this grade 6 cohort all received the same intervention as previous cohorts of teachers. However, in addition to testing the efficacy of the teacher intervention with all teachers and students, we were also interested in testing a student intervention, that we hypothesized would have implications on their self-efficacy as writers. The focus of our student intervention, thus, was at a different level and with a different grade level than that of the larger RCT study. We collected quantitative data on students first, then followed by a qualitative component to understand what may have contributed to students’ self-efficacy while revising.

Teacher and student participants

This cohort of participating grade 6 teachers consisted of 13 teachers. Each teacher had one focal class. Approximately 401 students were part of this cohort. All teachers participated in our professional development intervention. The student intervention component differed between randomly assigned groups. Of these students, 131 students were in the treatment group and 83 were in the comparison group, as one teacher declined to participate in the random assignment, representing an 8% attrition rate of teachers (leaving 12 teachers to be randomized). Across both groups, 52% of the students were female, 76% were Hispanic, and 62% of the students are Redesignated English Learners, a percentage that is much higher than the overall district demographics, since focal classes with higher percentages of ELs and RFEPs for all teachers’ classes (treatment and comparison) were selected for the study. The Self-Efficacy in Writing (SEW) means at baseline for both groups were not statistically different (m tx = 3.61; m c = 3.56).

Professional development intervention for teachers

In order to distinguish between the grade 7 to 12 study and this sub study of grade 6 teachers, we are providing a description of the professional development program since all teachers in this study were in the same PD and were trained together. We will subsequently explain what the “treatment” teachers in our self-efficacy intervention did that was above and beyond the PD all teachers attended to account for differences in student outcomes. Participating teachers attended 46 h of professional development throughout the school year, consisting of six full-day meetings and five after-school meetings.

The professional development intervention is informed by cognitive, sociocognitive, and sociocultural theory. In their cognitive process theory of writing, Flower and Hayes ( 1981 ) posit that writing is best understood “as a set of distinct thinking processes which writers orchestrate and organize during the act of composing” (p. 375), including planning, organizing, goal setting, translating, monitoring, reviewing, evaluating, and revising. They liken these processes to a “writer’s tool kit” (p. 385), which is not constrained by any fixed order or series of stages.

In describing the difficulty of composing written texts, Flower and Hayes ( 1980 ) aptly conceptualized writers as simultaneously juggling “a number of demands being made on conscious attention” (p. 32). While all learners face similar cognitive, linguistic, communicative, contextual, and textual constraints when learning to write (Frederiksen & Dominic, 1981), the difficulties younger, inexperienced, and underprepared students face are magnified. For these students, juggling constraints can cause cognitive overload. For example, ELs are often cognitively overloaded, especially in mainstreamed classrooms where they are held to the same performance standards as native English speakers (Short & Fitzsimmons, 2007 ).

Graham ( 2018 ) has pointed out that “available cognitive models mostly ignore cultural, social, political, and historical influences on writing development” (p. 272). He asserts that writing is “inherently a social activity, situated within a specific context” (p. 273). This view echoes Langer ( 1991 ) who, drawing on Vygotsky ( 1986 ), suggests that literacy is the ability to think and reason like a literate person within a particular society. In other words, literacy is culture specific and meaning is socially constructed. From a sociocognitive perspective, teachers should pay more attention to the social purposes to which literacy skills are applied, and should go beyond delivering lessons on content to impart strategies for thinking necessary to complete literacy tasks, first with guidance and, ultimately, independently.

Finally, sociocultural theory views meaning as being “negotiated at the intersection of individuals, culture, and activity” (Englert et al., 2006 , p. 208). Three tenets of sociocultural theory are applicable to the intervention (Adapted from Englert et al., 2006 ): (1) Cognitive apprenticeships: in which novices learn literate behaviors through the repeated modeling of more mature, experienced adults or peers to provide access to strategies and tools demonstrated by successful readers and writers (Vygotsky, 1986 ). (2) Procedural facilitators and tools: where teachers are most effective when they lead cognitive development in advance of what students can accomplish alone by presenting challenging material along with procedural and facilitative tools to help readers and writers address those cognitive challenges. (3) Community of practice: the establishment of communities of practice in which teachers actively encourage students to collaborate and provide ongoing opportunities and thoughtful activities that invite students to engage in shared inquiry.

The central core of the PD is the use of cognitive strategies to support all students in reading and writing about complex text. Cognitive strategies are conceptual tools and processes that can help students become more meta-cognitive about their work. The following are the cognitive strategies introduced in the PD:

Planning and Goal Setting, Tapping Prior Knowledge, Asking Questions and Making Predictions, Constructing the Gist, Monitoring, Revising Meaning, Reflecting and Relating, and Evaluating. Some sub-components are: Visualizing, Making Connections, Summarizing, Adopting an Alignment, Forming Interpretations, Analyzing Author’s Craft, and Clarifying Understanding (Olson, 2011 , p. 23)

The primary intent of the professional development is to provide teachers with lessons and materials to introduce the cognitive strategies to students toward the intended goal of improving students’ analytical essays about either fiction or non-fiction texts.

Teachers also learned specific writing strategies to help students revise their writing. To avoid “teaching to the test,” teachers use a different text, but similar in topic as the text used for the writing assessment as a training tool in order to model how to revise the pre-test into a multiple draft essay. Throughout a series of mini-lessons, students are taught a variety of skills through examining a mentor text/essay based on the training text. Students first read the training text using the aforementioned 15 cognitive strategies. Then, they are given a writing prompt similar to the one they used on the writing assessment. This writing prompt is dissected by having students fill out a Do/What Chart which instructs students to circle all of the verbs (Do) and underline all of the task words (What) in the prompt and transfer the verbs and tasks words onto a T-chart to help them understand what they are being asked to do (for example, “Select one important theme and create a theme statement.”) Then, students are given a mentor text/essay addressing the prompt they just dissected. This mentor text/essay is analyzed for the moves the writer makes, particularly in how he or she constructed the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

When working with the introduction, students are taught the HoT S-C Team (Hook/TAG/Story-Conflict/Thesis) acronym. The students are to identify that a writer often starts with an engaging hook that could be a quote, question or statement to make people think, fact, or even anecdote; then identifies the title-author-genre (TAG) of the text being written about to set the context for writing; adds purposeful summary of the story or conflict, and includes a thesis (claim).

Each component of the mentor text is color-coded using yellow (for summary sentences), green (for textual evidence), and blue (for student commentary) to help the students understand that a balance of purposeful summary, textual evidence, and commentary is important when constructing an analytical essay. Additionally, students are also taught about grammar brushstrokes (Noden, 2011 ) such as adding adjectives out of order, appositives, or using active verbs and are encouraged to revise some of their sentences with these brushstrokes to enhance sentence variety.

One of the essential activities in this intervention is to have teachers help students revise their on-demand writing samples into a more polished analytical essay, after these writing samples have been read and commented on by trained readers. It is during this part of the main study that our team decided to conduct the sub study on student self-efficacy. Given that all teachers experienced and received the same professional development and, in turn, taught the same revision strategies to their students, the only difference that we tested rested solely on asking the treatment students to use the Pre-Test Essay Revision Planner and Revised Pre-Test Reflection form. This self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and reflection strategy is aligned to Hayes’ ( 2012 ) control level of writing, which involves student self-efficacy. A more detailed explanation of this new intervention strategy follows.

Student intervention: pre-test revision planner and revised pre-test reflection form

In prior studies of our intervention, we have routinely asked teachers to analyze their students’ pre-tests as a formative assessment and to fill out their own reflection planner regarding their students’ strengths and areas needing growth as a tool to help with instruction. After reading about how much student self-efficacy influences writing outcomes (Bruning et al., 2013 ), we wondered if having students participate in assessing their own strengths and areas for improvement as writers and fill out a reflection similar to the one their teachers created would lead to better writing outcomes. With the consent of teachers participating in the intervention, we randomized the teachers’ classes into two groups. The comparison group received instruction from their teacher on how to revise their pre-test essays and were provided with comments from a trained reader. The treatment group not only received instruction from the teacher and comments from a trained reader, but also conducted a self-assessment of their work and filled out the Pre-Test Essay Revision Planner and Revised Pre-Test Reflection form to describe their process and assess the quality of their product after revising. Since all the students, treatment and comparison groups, participated in the same intervention and were taught the same strategies, this study tests the impact of the Pre-Test Essay Revision Planner and Revised Pre-Test Reflection form on students’ self-efficacy and writing quality. To promote treatment fidelity, all teachers, treatment and comparison, were required to submit their students’ revised pre-tests to the intervention developers in order to receive their stipend for participating in the year-long study. Treatment teachers were also required to submit the Pre-Test Essay Revision Planner planner.

To elaborate, the process we took treatment students involved two steps. The first part of the Pre-Test Essay Revision Planner (see Appendix 1) asked students to self-assess what they did effectively as writers on their essay and what they might have struggled with on the writing task. They were then asked to decide on goals for revisions in bulleted form, weighing suggestions by trained readers who commented on their papers. These were action steps the student proposed to take when revising his or her essay. After they have completed their revision, students reflected on what changes they made, what they were most proud of, and what their teacher did to help them reach their revision goals using the Revised Pre-Test Reflection form. In the comparison condition, students revised their pretests, but without the use of a planner, keeping everything else equal.

Sample student pre-test, revision planner, and revised pre-test

This section illustrates the multi-faceted components of the intervention. We start by examining a student’s pre-test with commentary from an experienced reader, then her revision planner, next her revised pre-test, and finally her self-assessment and reflection and consider how these components affect a student’s self-efficacy in writing.

The prompt the student responded to was an analysis of Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s short story “The Medicine Bag” for its theme as exhibited through the evolving relationship between the narrator and his great-grandfather as he visits him unexpectedly and the symbolism behind the gift he leaves the narrator prior to his passing (Fig. 1 ):

Student’s Pre-test with some commentary

The student’s attempt at the on-demand essay consists almost exclusively of summary, indicating that her command of analytical writing is still developing. The student starts the analysis with “In the beginning of the story…” followed by a long summary of the plot and puts forth the claim “this proves that Martin is embaress [sic] of his grandpa…” While this is not a theme statement it does indicate the writer’s understanding of the text. The trained reader also notes the writer’s recognition that the character changes over time and encourages her to focus on the author’s message or lesson when she revises (Fig. 2 ).

Trained reader’s letter to the student

The comments the student received from the trained reader focused revision on connecting commentary to textual evidence, developing a theme statement, and the role symbols play in the story. These types of comments are quite typical of the responses many students in this study received from our trained readers. After teachers received these comments and reviewed them, they passed these papers back to their students and treatment teachers had students fill out the Pre-Test Essay Revision Planner (see Fig. 3 ). We conjecture that this opportunity to self-assess may contribute to her persistence through the revision process better than her comparison peers who may only rely on given feedback, but no reflection nor goal setting (Bruning & Kauffman, 2016 ).

Student’s Pre-test essay revision planner

In her Pre-Test Essay Revision Planner, the student first focused on the strengths of her essay—what she did well. Then she addressed what she struggled with or didn’t do as well in her essay. Next, she set a goal to revise the introduction, by including a hook and TAG which indicates Title, Author, and Genre, and especially to “talk more about the message.” Much of what the student plans to do is quite specific to revising the introduction; revising an introduction and knowing what is expected can help students produce more focused papers that are organized with a clear direction in terms of analysis. Below is her revision of the writing assessment (Fig. 4 ):

Student’s revised Pre-test

The student’s revision is a noticeable improvement over her original pre-test. The revision has included a hook (e.g., an anecdote around traditions), attempts a theme statement (e.g., the importance of traditions), addresses the changing the relationship between the narrator and his grand-father, and also focuses on the medicine bag as a symbol. Notice how the student meets her revision goals, but also takes up the suggestion to focus on symbolism. The moves the student makes from pre-test to revision are akin to a student that makes a transition from knowledge-telling (e.g., summary) to knowledge-transformation (e.g., commentary) in their writing (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987 ). For example, in the students’ pre-test, she summarized how Martin exaggerates about his grandfather but did not explain how this exaggeration relates to his embarrassment. In the revision of this paper, the student explains, in detail, why Martin was embarrassed by his grandfather and why he felt compelled to make him seem more “glamorous” and larger than life. Moreover, the reflection on the revisions she made (below) demonstrates ownership over her revision process, with her teacher’s help (Fig. 5 ):

Student’s Revised Pre-Test Reflection

The student recognizes the changes she made from her pre-test to the revised version, particularly the inclusion of a message or theme statement and the improvements she made. She also emphasized how helpful her teacher was in helping her revise her body paragraphs, which was a goal that was not particularly emphasized on her revision planner, but proved to be a writing move that was successfully executed. The student exhibited a strong sense of self-efficacy. Note, her expression of pride in working on and completing the assignment).

Data collection and measures

Self-efficacy for writing scale.

To examine student growth in self-efficacy, particularly in writing, we adapted a pre-existing self-efficacy in writing measure called the Self-Efficacy for Writing Scale (SEWS), reliably measured by another research team (Bruning et al., 2013 ), by adding additional questions regarding revision practices. After cleaning the data for complete entries at pre and post-survey, our sample size consisted of 214 students who had completely filled out a pre and post-survey. The SEW survey had 22 Likert-scale questions on a scale from 1 to 5 in terms of how much they agree with each statement. To further analyze the SEW survey, but to also simplify the analytical process, we also conducted a factor analysis to reduce the number of components and created four composites, for specific areas of self-efficacy, as a result. The four composites used in our analysis, the questions that pertained to each one, and the factor loadings after applying orthogonal varimax rotations (Abdi, 2003 ) are in Table 1 below:

Ideation groups questions regarding students’ ideas and content in their essays together; Syntax pertains to students’ focus on grammar, spelling, and paragraph formation; Volition pertains to students’ abilities to follow-through with their assignment and complete it; and Revision questions pertain to students’ abilities to revise their paper for specific skills.

Academic writing assessment

In order to test the impact of an increase in self-efficacy in writing on students’ analytical writing, we used students’ scores on the Academic Writing Assessment, a writing assessment created for our intervention, that is administered to students prior to the intervention and after revision of the pre-test. Two prompts (one on “The Medicine Bag” and one on “Ribbons”) were created regarding two texts where the main character’s relationship with a grandparent changes throughout the story. The students stated a claim or theme statement about relationships and use textual evidence to support this theme. To control for prompt effects half of the students wrote to one of these prompts at pre-test and wrote to the other prompt at post-test, and vice versa.

Approximately twenty papers were randomly selected for scoring per teacher. Assessments were scored in a double blind process over four hours where the scorer neither knew if the paper they were scoring was written by a treatment or comparison student nor whether they were scoring a pre-test or post-test. Each paper was read twice and given a score from a range of 1 to 6, with possible score points from 2 to 12. If the two readers differed by more than two points (e.g., a 2 and 4) then a third, more experienced reader also gave the paper a score. If the third reader’s score matches either the first or the second reader, the third reader’s score was added to the score it matched. If the third reader’s score fell in between the first and second reader’s score, the third reader’s score was kept and the average of the first and second reader’s score was added to the kept score. All papers were scored in such a manner during a scoring event held over four hours. Raters agreed within a score point or better for 95% of the papers; 5% required a third reading, and 49% of the papers had exact agreements between the two scorers.

Pre-test essay revision planner and revised pre-test reflection form

To reiterate, the form asked students to self-assess, plan and goal set during revision, and reflect on the process after finishing their revisions. The reflection side of the planner was inspired by Daniel et al. ( 2015 ) who found that students who wrote a cover letter to their instructors detailing the changes they made to a revised paper, based on instructor feedback, submitted higher-quality revised papers than their control peers. The theory of change behind this planner is that it encourages students to identify problem areas, set goals, and remind them of these goals as they revise their pretest, encouraging them to accomplish these goals (see Daniel et al., 2015 ).

Student interviews

A sub-set of students from both the comparison and treatment classrooms were selected for interview purposes. Without knowing students’ AWA scores, teachers were asked to nominate one developing writer and one more proficient writer for the interviews. Selected students were provided with their pre-test, their revised pre-test, and their post-test; treatment students also were provided with their Pre-Test Essay Revision Planner and Revised Pre-Test Reflection form. Students were interviewed in the same room, but sat far away enough from each other so that ambient noise from the other interview being conducted would not be captured. Students were asked a series of open-ended questions (see Appendix 2) about their identities as writers (e.g., From a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself as a writer?); about their revision process; and what helped them to revise their papers/to meet their goals.

Research procedures

Randomly selected teachers chose one focal class with which to conduct these research activities:

Students in the selected classes were asked to take two timed on-demand writing assessments–one at the beginning of the school year and one at the end of the school year. These essays were scored during a double-blind session based on the Academic Writing Assessment (AWA) rubric that we created and validated in other studies (see Olson et al., 2017 ).

The students also took two self-efficacy in writing (SEW) surveys, one at the beginning of the school year and one at the end of the school year.

In between the two SEW surveys students’ teachers either were randomly assigned to have students reflect on their writing or not to reflect on their writing using the Pre-Test Essay Revision Planner and Revised Pre-Test Reflection form while revising their pretests.

Afterwards, two students from each class were randomly interviewed on their writing process with questions that focused on their identity as a writer and what helped them as writers.

Data analysis

To analyze growth on our SEW measure, we ran t-tests to measure change from pre to post on each of our aforementioned components from our factor analysis (ideation, syntax, volition, and revision). We then also ran t-tests to measure change from pre to post on the AWA differentiating between the treatment and comparison groups in order to test the impact of self-efficacy in writing on timed on-demand writing tasks.

Students’ revision-planners and post-revision reflections were analyzed for the types of goals students created for themselves by looking at idea units. Student interviews were transcribed by the first and second author, divided into idea units, and coded for students’ revision processes and what strategies/resources might have assisted them in doing so. Codes were independently generated and then verified between the two coders until they were agreed upon (Miles & Huberman, 2008).

Students with higher self-efficacy have better writing outcomes

When analyzing AWA scores, treatment students grew 1.90 points and the control students grew 1.33 points from pre to posttest. Both gains were statistically significant ( p < 0.001), indicating that the intervention had a positive impact on all participating students. However, differences in differences confirm that the treatment students had statistically significant greater gains than their control peers (△ = 0.57; p < 0.001).

Students’ reflections have positive impact on students’ self-efficacy in writing

At post-survey, the treatment SEW mean increased to 3.63 ( p < 0.76) and the control mean decreased to 3.47 ( p < 0.37). Differences in differences analysis revealed a slight statistical difference ( p < 0.10; △ = 0.11). The alpha level reported for the SEW items was 0.90.

Table 2 displays the pre to post means for the four composites from our factor analysis of the SEW questions: Ideation (idea formation); Syntax (grammar); Volition (persistence), and Revision (revision for clarity and content).

Based on these results, treatment students grew more than their comparison peers in the area of Revision strategies by 0.21 points; whereas, they both decreased in their Volition scores. However, the treatment students had less of a decline (e.g., -0.05 rather than -0.28 points). It is possible that both treatment and comparison students, who are in sixth grade, do not yet feel confident in producing high quality-writing samples during on-demand timed conditions; yet both groups managed to do so.

Students cite teacher instruction as most helpful in revising their writing

Qualitative analysis of the student interviews revealed that treatment students perceived the planner as being helpful as it provided them with a road map and check list as to what to focus on in the revision of their pre-test essay. For example, one student explained that her revision planner helped her “to know what I was supposed to do to my new revision.” She was able to reference her planner as she wrote and notice things that she forgot to include, which she then went back to add into the appropriate part of her essay. Additionally, for this student, filling out the planner was a process scaffolded by the written feedback she had received from the aforementioned trained reader as well as from her classroom teacher. It was the feedback and concrete suggestions she received, such as the reader comment that told her “I should add an author name, TAG line, and a title” and her teacher who suggested she “put it [my writing] in paragraphs and organize them,” that she used to set goals for herself in terms of what changes to make in order to improve her pretest. These comments were reflected in the list that the student wrote for herself on her revision planner, which included notes like “add a title,” “add a hook,” “organize paragraphs,” and “add the author’s name.” In her interview, when comparing her drafts, she pointed out these details like the hook and title she added as proof that she had made successful revisions. Other students who found the planner helpful reported similar experiences, such as working on the planner as a class with the guidance of the teacher, focusing on the different elements of essay writing they had learned about through the school year such as the parts of a strong introduction. One student even wrote down “reread the writing prompt” in her planner as part of her list of things to do, highlighting the use of her planner as a list of actionable steps for revising.

Moreover, it was particularly important that teachers taught or modeled specific strategies to address the revisions students needed to make, like showing them examples of how essay writers organize information into multiple paragraphs. One student said, for instance, that one thing that really helped her in her revisions was all the review and practice that her teacher had them do over the course of the year. These included reviewing specific aspects of “what to do in an essay, like how to start it and how to end it and when we should put the body paragraphs.” The fact that her teacher returned to these concepts more than once helped her remember what to consider when it came time to revise her pretest.

Many students felt their teachers modeled helpful strategies to develop a claim and to write a strong introduction. Writing hooks and including important information about the texts they were analyzing like the title, author, and genre, for example, came up frequently. However, students did not provide the same evidence for the development of their body paragraphs, particularly when it came down to providing their own commentary around the evidence they used to back up their claims. Although one student noted that she added details about the story’s characters to her draft to make it better and another stated that she learned that she had to add her own thoughts or opinions into her summary in order to make it a proper essay, there was little mention of specific things to consider or of tying these details or opinions to specific arguments or evidence presented in their papers.

Both treatment and comparison students credited their teachers’ instruction as being most helpful in revising their essay. Some students went so far as to state that before participating in the intervention this year, they had only a vague idea of what an essay was, let alone what parts it was supposed to have. For instance, one student explained that what helped him most in revising was “my teacher” who “was telling us… teaching us basically about theme, the hook, the introduction and the conclusion.” However, treatment students used more self-efficacious words such as the use of the first-person pronoun, “I,” “plans,” “knew what to do,” and were quick to point out exactly which parts of their papers were improved. In contrast, comparison students more often used the more global second-person pronoun, “we” or third-person pronoun “she/he [the teacher,” “told us what to do,” and “lesson” when describing their revision process. Additionally, they were less specific about where and how they improved their papers, explaining that they had improved their papers because they “got an order” or added “more details.” The distinction between the use of pronouns is also a hallmark of self-efficacious individuals who centralize the locus of control around writing to what they can do, rather than external sources such as an authority figure or more knowledgeable other. Though feedback in any form is useful. Individuals who take an active role in their own writing also exhibit better reflective skills (Shantz & Latham, 2011 ), particularly on the items we found on our SEW survey (Parisi, 1994 ).

Our study confirms that the higher a student’s self-efficacy in writing, the higher quality of writing will be produced, even on timed on-demand writing tasks. We also confirmed that teachers’ instructional practices have an impact on students’ self-efficacy in writing (Corkett et al., 2011 ; Schunk & Swartz, 1993 ). Most importantly, our findings suggest that a planned revision process that includes student self-assessment, planning and goal setting, and reflection (McMillan & Hearn, 2008 ) positively impacts self-efficacy. Prompting students to take ownership of their own learning, enabling them to assess their strengths and areas for improvement, providing direction in terms of accomplishing complicated writing tasks, and encouraging them to reflect upon their writing performance are what Hayes’ ( 2012 ) advocated for in his new framework. Students have a goal to improve their pre-test and outline the revision activities that need to be completed, while their teachers provide them with the success criteria and strategies to complete these goals.

Moreover, the process of revising their pre-tests provides students with the opportunities to develop positive affect towards the revision process as they are given opportunities to: (i) reflect on what they did well on their pre-tests and capitalize on their existing knowledge; (ii) observe, learn, and analyze successful writing moves during the revision tutorial by comparing non-examples with examples; (iii) receive constructive written feedback from trained readers on how to revise their pre-test; and (iv) experience and learn explicit writing skills that reduce anxiety as they deconstruct what a prompt is asking for and/or how to provide effective commentary on textual evidence (Bruning & Kauffman, 2016 ; Pajares et al., 2007 ).

The field is looking for interventions that can metaphorically move the needle for students from almost empty to full, particularly in literacy development. In the case of our study, the planner moved the needle for our treatment students because it gave students concrete direction on how to improve their pre-tests and this, in turn, impacted their performance on the post-tests. Our intervention contributes to the knowledge base on the impact reflection and goal setting can have on student writing. All students can benefit from explicit self-regulation and strategy development instruction (Graham & Harris, 1989 ; Harris et al., 2006 ), particularly if they support student reflection, goal setting, and self-monitoring strategies. Similar to Blake et al.’s recommendations ( 2016 ), embedding micro-goals that students can feel are accessible, feasible, and accomplishable can help students feel more in control of the revision process. Having a revision planner makes this process more scaffolded, explicit, and visible to students.

This work also demonstrates the importance of teacher instruction on student writing. As both treatment and comparison students cited their teachers’ instructions as most influential, these findings provide further support that writing instruction requires a teacher who is confident and well-equipped to provide students with guidance on how they can improve their writing. Engaging students in assessing their own strengths and areas for growth and then reflecting on their progress can enhance students’ motivation and commitment. However, a student may not be able to fully meet the goals they have set without explicit (or scaffolded) instruction by the teacher and classroom practice. Such instruction can contribute not only to a student’s self-confidence but also to their sense of competence. Hence, these findings provide further support that students’ self-efficacy is connected to teacher expertise.

Limitations

Though this study has promising results, it is not without limitations. We acknowledge that the sample was small and any findings need to be validated with a larger sample size; however, the fact that statistical significance was achieved demonstrates the potential of the revision planner in helping students develop stronger self-efficacy in writing skills. Additionally, more qualitative studies to triangulate the usefulness of the revision planner are needed to understand how the planner directly translated to results on the post-test.

Implications

Implications from this study demonstrate how important it is to provide students with the skills, strategies, and opportunity to engage in self-assessment and revision processes. This development of their declarative (what), procedural (how), and conditional (why) knowledge of how to compose text-based analytical essays and the pivotal role self-assessment can play in successful revision that can cultivate independent, self-efficacious learners who have the confidence and competence to succeed as analytical writers in secondary school and beyond.

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Trending Post : 12 Powerful Discussion Strategies to Engage Students

Engaging Post-Reading Activities

Whether your students are engaged in whole-class texts, literature circles, book clubs, or independent reading, you’ll need to gauge their analytical thinking. There are traditional assessment tools, like summary writing, graphic organizers, and quizzes, but after a while, these approaches can start to feel stale, both for the teacher and students. In this post, you’ll find a handful of unique post-reading activities to use with older students.

These assignments will help to keep reading discussions and assessments fresh. However, one size does not fit all. Consider offering students choices of how they can show their learning. Also, balance is important. Assessments are only fun when students don’t feel inundated with them.

Most of the post-reading activities you’ll read about in this post can be used with books, short stories, articles, poetry, and plays. They really aren’t genre specific, which makes them incredibly versatile. Plus, many of them can be used both during and after reading.

1. MAKE CONNECTIONS WITH MIND MAPS

Mind maps can be a great way to synthesize what students have gleaned from reading a book. Plus, there are so many ways to approach them! My favorite is to focus on a particular standard.

Have students put the title of the book in the middle of the map. Then, break down the standard. For example, let’s look at CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.3: “Analyze how particular lines of dialogue or incidents in a story or drama propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a decision.”

Now, let’s think about what skills are embedded in this standard. In order to be proficient with the standard, students need to:

analyze lines of dialogue
analyze story events
identify how dialogue and events propel action
analyze how dialogue and events contribute to characterization
explain how dialogue and events provoke characters to make decisions

In a mind map, then, students could create one extension from the center to explore each of these skills. Not sure how to help students begin with mind maps as post-reading activities? This visual is helpful !

Try the same idea with sketchnotes , which are amazing processing assignments to use with online learning.

2. ENCOURAGE PERSONAL REACTIONS WITH BOOKSNAPS

If you’d like to capture snippets of what passages are resonating most with students, ask them to create a booksnap journal as they read! This project can be fun to flip or scroll through because you will be able to see patterns. Are students mainly choosing humorous quotes or events? If so, push their thinking. What techniques is the author using to create this humorous effect (RL.8.6)?

Booksnaps provide us with opportunities to talk with students about what they are reading during conferences and small group discussions. Plus, they can easily be incorporated into a digital portfolio or reading journal.

Need a ready-to-go activity? Snapabook is a fun, alternative activity I created to tie together booksnaps with pop culture (Snapchat).

3. SCAFFOLD ANALYSIS WHILE READING WITH COLOR

If you need a low-key, quick post-reading activity that zeroes in on main idea and text evidence, try asking students to re-read with color. This exercise is less involved, so it’s great when you only have a short amount of time.

To complete this activity, students will need a text, a Post-It, and three different colors of markers or colored pencils. The basic premise is to hone in on a specific skill or standard – like finding the main idea, identifying text structure, or highlighting vocabulary. To do so, scaffold students’ reflection about the text with three questions that build. With each response, students draw their ideas (in a different color) on their Post-It.

When finished, have students share in small groups, or build the Post-Its into a gallery walk so that students can comment on one another’s work. Students can also re-read with color virtually with a wide variety of tech tools – Notability, Slides, Jamboard, and Glogster, just to name a few..

Read this post about re-reading with color to find more details to get started!

4. THINK CRITICALLY BY EVALUATING BOOK COVERS

Post-reading activities often involve writing. Students need to write informative essays. Yet, they don’t always have to be as traditional as we might expect. This activity allows students to reflect on what they have read, analyze the way the book is marketed, evaluate the effectiveness and accuracy of the cover, and then write about their findings.

Students who enjoy being artistic will love evaluating and re-designing the cover of their text. When we ask students to evaluate book covers, we are really asking them to first analyze what marketing tools are used to sell the book…and then to reflect on whether or not those marketing tools are effective and representative of the book itself.

This book cover activity can be fun to pair with book talks, elevator speeches, book clubs, literature circles, evaluating texts units, and reading workshop.

5. RESPOND WITH TECH USING FLIP GRID

Flip Grid is a powerful way to get students talking about their texts. As a post-reading activity, try having middle and high school students respond to an essential question…or pose one!…using an app like Flip Grid. Classmates can respond to the original videos to keep the discussion going.

A couple things to think about if you are considering using this platform:

It can be extremely time consuming to listen to and respond to Flip Grid videos. Middle and high school teachers know. With over 100 students total, it just doesn’t make sense to sit in front of the screen for hours on end. So, brainstorm how you can make it work for you.

Do your students participate in literature circles? Just have them post one video for the group.
Incorporate Flip Grid into a menu of options so that students can choose it, but not everyone will end up doing it.
Stagger due dates so that videos are submitted at different times.
Have students respond to one another’s FlipGrid posts!

6. GET ARTSY AND CONCISE WITH ONE PAGERS

Students are often drawn to one pagers – digital or print! They have just the right amount of creativity and flexibility. Plus, they are only one page, which is much less daunting than an essay! Of course, one pagers can’t ever replace essays completely, but they can be a breath of fresh air when you want students to analyze a text without creating large stacks of work to assess.

If you haven’t explored one pagers yet, you’ll notice that students need scaffolding. They are often confused when presented with a blank page and vague directions. Read more about one pagers , their benefit, and using them as a post-reading activity. Here are the scaffolded resources I use for fiction and informational texts .

7. CREATE GALLERY WALKS

Use QR codes or educational playlists as part of a gallery walk. QR codes or links on a playlist can lead students to videos and articles. If your students are reading Romeo and Juliet , for instance, find high-interest videos and articles that feature a variety of opinions about or interpretations of the work. Then, have students respond in small groups, in a back-channel chat, on a discussion board, or in a breakout group.

To illustrate, pretend students just finished reading The Hunger Games . Ask students who have read it to add to a short graffiti wall on Jamboard or Slides to share their thoughts and an extension question.

One quick tip for using QR codes! Make sure that once you create them, the links won’t expire. Some websites will save your QR files for you to keep them active, but others will not. If you plan to use the activity again in the future, choosing the right QR code generator will save you time.

CONSIDERATIONS…

So there you have it! Seven post-reading activities that capitalize on technology or students’ attraction to visuals. As a final thought, remember that students need complete clarity about post-reading activities they are being asked to complete. We need to be able to explain…

What is the purpose of this assignment?
How is it going to help students learn?
How will students be able to tell they are learning? Does this project make growth visible?
Is the project relevant to students? Can you use it to tie in students’ interests?
When will students receive your feedback? Without meaningful and timely feedback, projects typically are less effective.
Who is the intended audience? Can the project be shared with a wider audience? Authentic audiences are motivating!

And, even though many of these post-reading activities are visually appealing, we need to make sure that we are selecting projects because they will truly tell us what we want to know about student learning, rather than because they might look pretty hanging up. Of course, that may be a bonus!

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Writing about Reading: A Quick Guide to Quick Literary Essays

Writing About Reading Blog Series FINAL (1)

For years, I taught the unit Literary Essays: Writing about Reading in Lucy Calkins’s previous Writing Units of Study, co-written with Medea Mcevoy (2006). The work that my students produced was typically solid and thoughtful. I was impressed with the way in which the unit supported them in developing skills at the intersection of reading and writing, the way it pushed them toward deeper interpretation and analysis of texts while also supporting them in writing well. The unit moves students thoughtfully through reading short texts, developing interpretations through writing, then selecting a thesis and evidence and crafting an essay over the course of about 4-6 weeks.

When I was working full time as staff developer for the Reading and Writing Project, I was introduced to a whole new way of thinking about essay writing. Kathleen Tolan, Senior Deputy Director for the Project, spearheaded some very exciting work on teaching students to compose “fast essays”, work that involves students generating ideas, rehearsing, and drafting all in one quick go. After coaching students through a reading of a short text, usually in a Read Aloud, Kathleen teaches students to first “talk an essay”, channeling them to rehearse aloud how each part of the essay might go in small groups while she coaches and prompts. Then, Kathleen sends the students off to write the very same essay they just practiced, this time on their own. When I’ve modeled this work in classrooms, I sometimes get asked by teachers whether the coaching is too heavy-handed. Sometimes it seems as if I’ve prompted students so much it’s as if I’ve written the essay for them. My response is always that students need rehearsal and need concrete, specific models in order to write well. Also, there tends to be huge variation in the work that students produce. If the coaching was too heavy-handed, wouldn’t all students produce essentially the same piece?

The two ideas that resonate most with me about the fast essay work are that students don’t always need 4-6 weeks to compose a nice literary essay once they are familiar with essay structure and that talking in essay form is not only a sophisticated, important skill in its own stead, but it also serves as very powerful rehearsal for writing.

This is not to say that we should throw a writing process approach out the window and channel students to write quick, one-off, prompted pieces every day. Far from it. Students must also learn to gather ideas, to draft and go through a lengthy revision process, to stay with a piece of writing over an extended period of time. It is the process approach that supports students in writing with volume, stamina and craft and through which they learn to write well. I believe that it is precisely because students have been taught to write using a process approach that they are successful when faced with producing a piece of writing quickly.

There are three essential steps to helping students to generate solid literary essays in just a class period or two.

Reading Interpretively

Fast Drafting

The prerequisite to writing a strong literary essay is to read the text one will write about carefully and thoughtfully. The best literary essays are the ones built upon strong interpretations. When reading a text in order to write about it, there are some ways that students can interact with the text at various points in order to move effectively and efficiently toward growing big ideas. As is recommended in Lucy Calkins’s literary essay work, I strongly recommend that students write about short texts, particularly when they are first learning how to write literary essays. The short texts could be short stories, picture books, or even excerpts from larger books.

Organize students into clusters of 3-4, and, during a Read Aloud, stop at various points to coach them through asking and answering some of the below questions in these small groups to lead them toward growing big ideas about the text.

In the beginning of a text, students can ask themselves questions such as:

Whose story is being told?
What kind of person is the character
What does the character want?
What are some of the feelings in this part of the text?

Toward the middle of a text, students can ask:

What gets in the character’s way?
What are the people & things that add to how the character is feeling?
Are the feelings changing? How?
What are the issues that are emerging?

At this point, it’s helpful to include a bit of whole-class discussion to support students’ analysis. There is a huge leap in thinking to move from naming a character’s feelings to analyzing some of the issues that are emerging in a text. But it is in this leap that true interpretation begins to take place, and the groundwork for lovely big ideas or thesis statements is laid. For example, if a character is feeling picked on or ostracized because he is different from his peers, an issue that students may recognize as starting to emerge could be “people often don’t accept differences in others, but they should.” Or, “people are often afraid to be true to themselves because they don’t want to be made fun of.” Feel free to interject some of your own suggestions as models, particularly if students are struggling.

At the end of a text, students can ask:

What does the text seem to be saying about an issue?
What life lesson is the text teaching?
As students talk in their clusters, listen in and try to capture some of what they are saying on a chart or SmartBoard. These statements can easily be turned in to lovely thesis statements.

Kathleen Tolan posits that talking an essay it is one of the most effective ways to rehearse for this kind of writing. First, choose one of the statements you recorded earlier, one that you feel would make for a viable essay. Still in their clusters, set students up to talk through each part of the essay, perhaps referring to prompts or essay structures you have previously taught. You might post a list of transition words and phrases to help students with structure, such as: “One reason this idea is important is that..”, and “Another reason…”

Fast Drafting

Imagine yourself as a sports coach, spurring your writers on with helpful tips on structure, timing, and craft. As students are writing, remind them of all they know about good essay writing. You might whisper to one student that transition phrases help with organization, and to another that text examples should match the thesis.

Needless to say, this work is an excellent way to practice for any standardized (or other) test in which students are required to read texts and write about them within a prescribed time limit. If you are interested in reading more about fast essay writing, see Boxes and Bullets: Personal and Persuasive Essays by Lucy Calkins, Cory Gillette, and Kelly Boland Hohne. For more on Literary Essays and to read more of Kathleen’s work, see The Literary Essay: Writing about Fiction by Lucy Calkins, Kathleen Tolan, and Alexandra Marron. Both books are in the series Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing (2013).

We would love to hear more of your thoughts on writing about reading in a Two Writing Teachers community get-together of sorts. Please join us on February 3 at 8:30EST for a Twitter Chat on Writing about Reading. Please use the hashtag #TWTBlog. We hope to see you there!

Published by Anna Gratz Cockerille

Anna is a staff developer, literacy coach, and writer, based in New York City. She taught internationally in places such as Sydney, Australia; San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and Auckland, New Zealand in addition to New York before becoming a staff developer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University (TCRWP). She has been an adjunct instructor in the Literacy Specialist Program at Teachers College, and teaches at TCRWP where she helps participants bring strong literacy instruction into their classrooms. Anna recently co-wrote Bringing History to Life with Lucy Calkins, part of the 2013 series Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann). She has been a researcher for Lucy Calkins, contributing especially to Pathways to the Common Core (Heinemann, 2012) and Navigating Nonfiction (Heinemann, 2010). View all posts by Anna Gratz Cockerille

17 thoughts on “ Writing about Reading: A Quick Guide to Quick Literary Essays ”

I like the idea of rehearsing writing by talking. I’m still not convinced that doing this in a condensed amount of time is beneficial for effective writing, of any kind, in the long run. Thanks for the references. I will look them up.

Asking questions are really pleasant thing if you are not understanding anything entirely, but this piece of writing gives good understanding yet.

This is great! I’ve seen so many students who have great verbal skills, but don’t do as well in writing. This is great rehearsal for these (and all) students to talk it through in the steps you outlined and then take it to pen and paper right away. I will try this one for sure!

Oh wonderful, let us know how it goes. You are so right about students with a huge discrepancy between their verbal skill and skill in writing. This kind of rehearsal shows them that composition begins way before we put pen to paper. Their ideas are high level and valid, even if they struggle to get them on the page.

Love, LOVE, L-O-V-E the idea of fast essays. I wish that idea had been around when I was in the classroom. But now that I’ve learned about it, I will add it to my consulting repertoire. Thanks Anna!

Thanks Stacey – I agree, so great for classroom use across the board. Fast essays are wonderful in content areas. As a consultant/coach, I love bringing them into classrooms, both because it’s such a great snapshot of the level of students’ work/thinking, and also because it doesn’t take a whole lot of prep, so there’s not a big burden placed on the teacher to get ready.

Lifting this text: ” I sometimes get asked by teachers whether the coaching is too heavy-handed. Sometimes it seems as if I’ve prompted students so much it’s as if I’ve written the essay for them. My response is always that students need rehearsal and need concrete, specific models in order to write well. Also, there tends to be huge variation in the work that students produce. If the coaching was too heavy-handed, wouldn’t all students produce essentially the same piece?”

Agreed! If the coaching was too heavy – handed, the pieces would be remarkably similar. And this would not necessarily be “bad” if the students needed additional guided practice.

Too often, teachers go from “I Do It” modeling to now “You Do It” which is literally handing the work off without rehearsal, auditory practice and any scaffolding needed to promote student success at an independent level. Opportunities for practice with some support are critical for many students who are now trying to understand writing instead of “guess what the teacher wants me to write today.”

Thanks so much for sharing! This is critical work and such a great part of the week long blog series!

You’re right Fran that it wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if students’ work seemed similar after heavy-handed coaching, especially at the start of a unit while setting a vision for the work, and especially if the new work is markedly higher level than what students were producing without the scaffold. That rehearsal sometimes feels like “cheating” but it’s actually where the real magic happens! Thanks for stopping by.

Writing should be collaborative. Rehearsing gives students a chance to channel their conversations. Writing is noisy!

I love that! Writing is noisy! I agree, in a truly productive writing workshop, there is always a gentle (or not so gentle) hum.

That’s a great point of view! Back in school writing assignments were a true torture, because we had to write with our heads humbly lowered to notebooks, strictly following sheme of “example from a book – example from history – example from life”. There was no “magic” despite all talent and efforts of my teahers. And we didn’t even have a clue what to do – Internet wasn’t as filled as now. Now you can talk to Google like to a person and get exatly what you need. The first search result was not the best example of an essay outline, but the idea is that you can get from Google anything you want, if you can explain what you want properly lol – http://www.writemypapers.org/essay-writing/essay-outline-example.html I wish my teahers thought about changing the routine.

Lots of good details here, Anna. I would say that many kinds of quick-write practices are good for students. Practice with that prior guidance is a help, then they are more able to practice on their own. Sometimes it’s a motivation too to know that they’re going to write after reading, helps them read more closely too. Thanks!

Great point Linda that students often read more closely if they know they are going to write. I suspect, too that using a term like “essay” can feel lofty and can inspire students to really dig in to texts to produce their best thinking and find viable evidence.

Reblogged this on Gently Read Literature .

Thanks for sharing this, Anna – we are just about to begin lit essays, and this is awesome work to with kids. The “heavy handed coaching” sets the stage for real independednce, I feel.

Oh great! Can’t wait to read about your Lit Essay work, Tara!

Reblogged this on Stephen Page .

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What I've learned from reading tons of your essays (as a college senior)

EDIT: I'm going to do a part 2 later tonight. There were more patterns I noticed but didn't have the time to fit in this post.

EDIT 2: I've been getting a ton of PM's and messages to read essays. While I wish I could help all of you, I simply can't leave thorough feedback for all of you. I can give my initial reaction, but that's it. If you can, please ask questions and I will make a new post about it on how you might resolve your problems with your essays. It's going to be a very general thread, but I hope it still helps. I really want to emphasize that you should post your question in the thread here, because I am slowly getting lost in my own dm's.

EDIT 3: here's part 2: https://redd.it/du0axm

After reading a ton of essays from those of you applying ED (I apologize to those I didn't have the chance to get back to!), there were some patterns that I felt needed to be addressed.

To preface, I'm a college senior, and by no means am I a leading authority on writing essays. I am trying to help in anyway I can, and I felt that this was a good way to do so.

1) Too much narrative

Example: My heart raced as the door shut. It was 2 AM. Jack and I both ran with no other destination in mind other than out. Looking back, all I could see was my shadow trailing behind. Our footsteps became the manifestations of our desperation to get out--each step forward louder than the next. Then... we could finally see something: blue and red flashing lights. We were finally saved.

Imagine that narrative, but have it drag on for another two or three paragraphs, essentially taking up more than half your essay. I've been noticing this kind of writing A LOT in the essays I've been reading, and while the writing itself is fine, the problem is the fact that I learn nothing about you. Look, I get it: you want to paint the story and captivate the reader. But at this point, this seems to be overplayed. I don't really care that it was 2 AM. I don't care that your shadow was trailing behind you (as it should, anyway...). I'm not saying these details shouldn't be included, but please, please remember to balance your narratives out with introspection. What do I mean by that? Well, there are a variety of ways to do this. You can start by showing some of your beliefs, values or traits as a result of the event. For example, say you were helping some students out with their homework. Instead of pAiNtInG the details of the setting or what the students were doing, you could showcase your personality trait of being patient and kind. How? You could say something like, "As each student tried to figure out how to sculpt their own masterpieces, I couldn't hide my smile. I hoped that after buying them 50 pounds of clay to mold, these students would see the same freedom of expression and beauty in sculpting as I did when I was young."

By no means is this a perfect example, but I hope it illustrates what I'm talking about. In those 2 sentences, we learn a couple things about the person: they're generous because they bought a ton of clay for these students when they didn't have to; they love art and see sculpting as the ultimate way to express themselves. You don't need to write all these flowery details about what the students were doing, or how the air in the room felt or whatever. Balance it out with narrative that tells me something about YOU.

2) Quirky essays without anything substantive to say...

I'm sure many of you have read williamthereaders top 5 most common essays. If you haven't, I suggest you read it! Quirky but non-substantive essays are probably my least favorite essays. These are the essays that talk about some obscure thing in their lives and then relate it back to some larger picture about themselves. In most cases, though, students who do this fail to make it substantive. For example, I've read several essays about cookies (I don't know why this is a recurring theme). In these essays, students talk about their love for cookies, but that's as far as it goes. Here's the thing, though: liking cookies isn't really quirky.... everyone likes cookies... Look, I get that you want to seem different, but you do so at the expense of coming off as just weird or boring. It also feels really contrived when I see someone talk so passionately about their favorite cookie and just ramble about how it taste; I learn nothing about you other than the fact that your favorite cookie is an oreo or double fudge.

If you do take the quirky route, please, PLEASE make sure you have something to say about yourself other than your quirk. Yes, quirks are cool and all, and they do help differentiate students, but I can't differentiate you from other students if 75% of you like oreos. Ask yourself what makes YOU different by having this quirk. Do you think differently because of your quirk? Do you see the world differently? And no, liking cookies is not quirky, so please stop writing about your favorite cookie! Everyone likes cookies!!!!! I would consider you quirky if you didn't like cookies... (i'm kidding... partially, you freak!)

3) The negative essay

I'm sure everyone has seen one of these. These are the sob story essays. Most of the time, these essays are 90% negative and 10% introspective. Please don't take this to mean that I'm being rude or inconsiderate of your hardships. I'm actually genuinely concerned for many of you who write about these serious topics. I think the issue stems from the fact that many of you see your essays as a therapy session. I get it. It's personal, it's deep, it's vulnerable. But I don't think this is necessarily the time to vent all your anger and sadness. AO's are not your therapists. Again, I don't mean to sound rude. If you are really struggling with a loss, personal issue, or whatever, please, please reach out to a trusted friend of adult. Yes, it is sometimes beneficial to write down your frustrations on paper, but realize that college essays have a very specific audience, and that there is a time and place for everything.

If you do decide to write about something like this, really think about how you have changed because of it. Do you think differently? Do you see the world differently? Are you more energetic and animated with your friends? Do you cherish life more and how so? Focus on the positives. Focus on who you are today and who you strive to be, not who you were when you were sad or upset.

4) The essay that jams way too many things into 650 words

These essays are the ones that jump around and try to include as much as possible about themselves, from the instruments they play to the food they cook to how they dance. Here's the problem, though: when you try to talk about yourself from 30,000 feet above, it will just fall flat. There are so many elements in your essay that some things just don't flow very well together, and everything just feels out of wack. How exactly does your passion for violin relate to your love of cheese and how it brings your family together? It just feels contrived, rushed, and makes you seem really desperate. You might as well tattoo "pls accapt hahvard" on your forehead.

Zoom in and focus yourself on a couple of things. Don't try to talk about everything. Think about what was most formative to you, and then think about some values, beliefs, thoughts, traits, etc that you want to portray. You could also go the other way around and figure out what values/beliefs/thoughts/traits etc you want to showcase and think of what story/microcosm of your life most aptly hits those points.

5) The pretentious essay

This one is really subjective to the reader. There was one essay I read that was ranting about capitalism and then somehow related it back to autism and kids dancing at the orchestra. The essay tried to impose a greater sense of morality, and it just didn't work. This essay felt completely insincere . As soon as I get the feeling that someone is being insincere, I don't read the rest of their essay. Think about it: if you were on a date, and your date was talking about capitalism and somehow related it back to autism while suggesting they had the superior sense of morality, would you want to continue your relationship with this person? Most of you are 17 writing these essays. I don't really need the most profound subject matter to be discussed. I just want to get to know who you are, but I want to know the best parts of who you are. It becomes extremely difficult to advocate for someone when your first impression of them is a dbag.

There's no easy fix to this other than having someone who knows you well read your essay. Your friends can usually catch if the essay sounds like you. Another option that I suggest, as have many on this sub, is to just take a break and not look at your essay for a week. Come back to it and see if your opinion changes. Read it outloud. Read it backwards. Imagine if you were on a date and you read them your essay; would they want to have a second date with you?

I hope this helps some of you for your RD schools! Again, I apologize to everyone who I didn't get back to. I'll try to answer questions (if there are any) in this thread.

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The Reading and Writing Section

The Reading and Writing section presents short reading passages (or passage pairs) followed by a single multiple-choice question. Questions on the Reading and Writing section represent one of four content domains—Craft and Structure, Information and Ideas, Standard English Conventions, and Expression of Ideas. To help you budget your time, questions that test similar skills and knowledge are grouped together and arranged from easiest to hardest.

The test is divided into 2 modules, each of which includes questions from all four different domains.

What the Reading and Writing Passages Are Like

The passages in the Reading and Writing section range from 25 to 150 words. Passages represent the subject areas of literature, history/social studies, the humanities, and science.

What the Reading and Writing Questions Are Like

The questions on the Reading and Writing section fall into four content domains:

Information and Ideas Measures comprehension, analysis, and reasoning skills and knowledge and the ability to locate, interpret, evaluate, and integrate information and ideas from texts and informational graphics (tables, bar graphs, and line graphs).
Craft and Structure Measures the comprehension, vocabulary, analysis, synthesis, and reasoning skills and knowledge needed to understand and use high-utility words and phrases in context, evaluate texts rhetorically, and make connections between topically related texts.
Expression of Ideas Measures the ability to revise texts to improve the effectiveness of written expression and to meet specific rhetorical goals.
Standard English Conventions Measures the ability to edit text to conform to core conventions of Standard English sentence structure, usage, and punctuation.

Start Practicing

Start studying for the digital SAT today by downloading Bluebook™ and taking a full-length SAT test in the same application you will use on test day. Full-length digital SAT practice in Bluebook familiarizes students with the test application interface and supporting tools and features like formula sheets, digital accommodations, and calculators.

From the My Practice dashboard on the College Board website, you'll immediately see your adaptively scored practice test results and a practice test review of the test items, the correct answers, and a thorough explanation of the answer.

Armed with a baseline understanding of your performance on the digital SAT, you can use your score results and individual item responses to delve further into digital SAT preparation content on Khan Academy ® .

In partnership with College Board, Khan Academy has built a digital SAT course that includes videos, articles and worked examples designed to help you understand and experience what’s new and improved about the digital SAT.

If you're testing with paper-based accommodations on test day, prepare for the digital SAT with our linear (nonadaptive) practice tests 1–4 available for download.

Full-length Practice Tests in Bluebook

Practice with one of the full-length adaptive digital Practice Tests in Bluebook, then select "View your score" to access scores, correct answers, and rationales.

Go to Bluebook

Download Bluebook to start practicing for the digital SAT.

TSI Writing Practice Test

Here is our free TSI Writing practice test. The latest version of the TSI test has 30 questions on the English Language Arts and Reading test. We have divided this into two parts. This practice test covers the Language Arts section with 15 challenging practice questions. Question types include sentence revision and essay revision. Try our TSI Writing practice test to ensure that you are fully prepared.

For questions 1–11, select the best version of the underlined part of the sentence. If you think the original sentence is best, choose the first answer.

To swim, to jog, and spinning are my aunt’s favorite ways of maintaining her health..

Returning to his old job, everything there looked the same as John remembered.

Mount Kilimanjaro is a dormant volcano in Tanzania, being the highest mountain in Africa.

I was alarmed by the noise looking through the window to see who was outside.

Scientists have found evidence that acid rain was a major cause of the largest extinction on Earth 250 million years ago.

Rushing to the scene, the frightened cat was stuck high in the tree and had to be pulled down by the firemen.

You should never leave your car running while filling the gas tank although it is cold.

Alex was given the cold shoulder to Mary Ann ever since he heard about her rude comments.

He was sure that To Kill a Mockingbird was his favorite novel, but he just couldn’t explain why he loved it so much.

If the roads were covered in snow and ice, so Kate decided to cancel her dinner plans.

The constant noise was driving the poor woman insane, she had to find some peace and quiet soon.

For questions 12–15, read this early draft of an essay and then answer the questions that follow.

In context, which of the following sentences would best be inserted after sentence 3.

In context, which of the following is the best way to revise and combine sentences 2 and 3 (reproduced below)?

In context, where would the following sentence best be placed?

Which of the following sentences from the passage could best be deleted without losing too much essential information?

1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15
End

Opinion and Informational Text Sets: Reading and Writing from One Text Set (+ a Freebie)

This past year I have been wrapping up a project that has been quite the labor of love: Monthly Text Sets. The monthly text sets solve a list of problems I consistently ran into when teaching 4th Grade ELA. But first, what are the monthly text sets? The monthly text sets are a set of nonfiction passages based around one topic. Students use the passages/articles to write in response to reading. The text set includes an opinion or informational writing prompt and reading comprehension questions. This means that you can use ONE set of texts to teach both reading and writing.

What does each monthly text set include?

2 – 3 Nonfiction Passages based around one topic
Comprehension Questions aligned to standards
Writing Prompt for Opinion or Informational Text-based writing in response to reading
Graphic Organizer for Students
Teacher Model Graphic Organizer
Teacher Model Essay
Differentiated for Grades 3-5

Reading Comprehension

Each text set includes 2 – 3 passages/articles (texts). They are nonfiction topics and the texts are differentiated for grades 3-5. The 4th and 5th grade articles sometimes remain the same, but the questions are different for each grade level. The questions follow the type of questions students might see on a state test such as the Florida State Assessment, and are aligned to the Common Core State Standards. Even if your state doesn’t exactly follow common core standards and they have their own, the questions are based on skills as well such as main idea, text structure, cause and effect, etc.

You can see examples of the question types below. Each grade level is included. I kept it this way so that even if you teach another grade level, you can differentiate for your students if needed. Don’t forget to grab this free shark text set before you go! Click here or on any of the images.

3rd Grade Reading Comprehension

4th Grade Reading Comprehension

5th Grade Reading Comprehension

You will also get a link that gives you access to the Standards Alignment Google Sheet. This way you can keep track of which standards each text set is covering. If you wanted to cover a specific skill, you have an easy way to track and access which standards are covered in which text set.

The writing portion includes a prompt in which students will write using both texts to respond. The prompt for this text set is an informational writing prompt:

Write an essay in which you explain the importance of sharks in the ocean ecosystem.

If you are familiar with my writing units, then you know that boxes and bullets are the standard around here. I have a lot of thoughts about that, but the gist is that they are so simple and provide a consistent structure for your students. Each text set includes a boxes and bullets graphic organizer for students and a teacher example to model or guide your students. Depending on where you are in your writing instruction, you can also have students do this in their notebook.

Writing paper is also included for a final published piece. Depending on how long you have and/or if you are in test-prep mode, you may choose to have students write a rough draft on notebook paper or in their writing notebook and then write a final copy on the publishing paper. Then, display in your classroom or hallway for the world to see all of your students’ amazing writing!

The plan and example essay includes 2-3 body paragraphs. So your students will be writing 4 – 5 paragraph essays. Depending on which you prefer to have your students write, you’ll just add/remove a body paragraph.

Paragraph 1: Introduction
Paragraph 2: Body Paragraph 1
Paragraph 3: Body Paragraph 2
Paragraph 4: Conclusion

There is also an editable teacher plan and essay available as a PowerPoint and Google doc so that you can edit and adapt the essay to your needs.

You might also use a Google Doc/PowerPoint to write the essay with your students and use the example as a guide.

What are the topics for each month?

One of my favorite parts about these text sets is that they have a monthly theme. HOWEVER, most topics can be used at any point in the year. Some topics are month-specific such as “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day” in January and “The Benefits of Bees” in April (it mentions Earth Day), but you can definitely fit these into to your current curriculum. And I have to tell you that even though all 12 months have been released, we’re still creating these each month.

January: MLK Day (Opinion Writing Prompt) → Read the blog post here.
February: Equality in Education: Mary McLeod Bethune and Thurgood Marshall (Informational Writing Prompt)
March: Ants: Perk or Pest? (Opinion Writing Prompt)
April: The Benefits of Bees (Informational Writing Prompt)
May: Save the Sea Turtles (Informational Writing Prompt)
June: Shark Shenanigans (Informational Writing Prompt) Grab this one for FREE here or at the end of this post.
July: Hurricanes (Informational Writing Prompt)
August: Video Games: Helpful or Harmful? (Opinion Writing Prompt)
September: Homework: Helpful or Harmful? (Opinion Writing Prompt)
October: Bats: Benefit or Bother? (Opinion Writing Prompt)
November: Paid to Play: Should College Athletes be Paid? (Opinion Writing Prompt)
December: Polar Bear Problems (Informational Writing Prompt)

WHY use monthly text sets?

Let’s talk about WHY you might want to use text sets in your classroom. While teaching 4th grade in a self-contained classroom, I consistently felt like we were giving our students too many texts to grapple with. At any point in time, we juggled some (and sometimes ALL ) of the following texts:

Read Aloud (chapter book)
Read Aloud (picture book)
Writing Mentor Text (picture book)
Reading Text Sets (passages as part of a center or independent practice)
Guided Reading Text (small groups)
Shared Reading Text (textbook used in whole groups or small groups)

(This is JUST for Reading)

Writing Text Sets for test prep or writing in response to reading (In 4th and 5th Grade, this was ALLLLL the time.)
Science Textbook
Social Studies Text

When you list it out like that, it’s a LOT of texts. And they all serve a purpose. And they’re all important. But we continuously ran into problems.

❌We couldn’t fit them all in. (Shocking, right?)

❌We felt behind or overwhelmed because we were trying to do too much and unable to get in #allthethings.

❌Science and social studies were not getting the time they deserved. And honestly, I don’t think the future of our world can afford to not make science and social studies a priority.

The bottom line is we were trying to use TOO. MANY. TEXTS. One big issue that I began to see is that we treated the texts that we were using for writing as if we didn’t have to actually read them. As if we didn’t have to read them closely, dissect, analyze, and synthesize to produce a clear and concise essay with a controlling idea, supporting details, voice, etc. And, of course, in a way that did not copy the text. You and I both know that’s a lot to ask of a 4th grader (or 3rd grader or 5th grader or quite frankly – an adult.)

There had to be a better way. So I decided to ELIMINATE or INTEGRATE.

✅Eliminate the texts that we didn’t need to use, that didn’t support other content area standards or that didn’t offer high-engaging content or just weren’t the best quality of texts in the first place. If my students weren’t interested in it and it didn’t align to other content area standards – I needed to find better texts.

✅ Integrate Science and Social Studies into our ELA curriculum.

How do the monthly text sets fit into this?

Each monthly text set can be used for both Reading and Writing. The topic of each text set is either high-engaging or supports Social Studies/Science standards. It may not directly align with science or social studies standards, but topics support those areas. For example, many of the animal topics discuss life cycles and roles in the ecosystem.

HOW do I teach writing using the text sets?

If you’re looking for more support in teaching writing, then you may be interested in the complete writing units . Both the informational and opinion writing unit include daily lesson plans, PowerPoints that help you navigate writing workshop.

Are you ready to try the monthly text sets?

If you’re ready to give the monthly text sets a try in your classroom, you can grab the Sharks Text Set freebie by clicking on the button below.

Just click here or on the image below to snag them.

+44 (0) 207 391 9032

How Long Should a Thesis Statement Be?

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Our answers to the top 25 essay writing questions

(Last updated: 13 May 2021)

Since 2006, Oxbridge Essays has been the UK’s leading paid essay-writing and dissertation service

We have helped 10,000s of undergraduate, Masters and PhD students to maximise their grades in essays, dissertations, model-exam answers, applications and other materials. If you would like a free chat about your project with one of our UK staff, then please just reach out on one of the methods below.

We get asked similar questions about essay writing time and time again. From ‘basic’ questions like “How many types of essay are there?” through to more complex questions on structure and language. So, we thought it was high time we gathered all the answers together into one place, where every curious student can turn to when in need.

Below are the top 25 questions students ask us about essay writing and our answers, plus plenty of links to other useful articles on our blog and on the web. Hopefully, this material will help get your essay writing off to a great start!

1. How do you write an academic essay?

You read widely, take copious notes, and develop a sound knowledge both of the broader field and of the debate into which your essay will intervene. You develop an outline and a plan, both to test the feasibility of your thesis and to structure your arguments optimally. You come up with an argument. You support the hell out of it. You structure it impeccably, with appropriate introduction, body, and conclusion. You use all that reading you’ve done to anticipate counter-arguments to your position, and you rebut them. You use all the academic turns of phrase you’ve learned, and above all else, you answer the question!

Want to know more? We’ve got lots of articles on our website to help you through every step of this process. But reading the tips on this page isn’t a bad start…

2. Can you start an essay with a quote?

This really depends on how well you pull it off. A quotation that perfectly encapsulates the essence of your essay topic can be a very effective way of leading your reader into it. On the other hand, it’s common for students to use quotations as a kind of “cop-out”, or a way of avoiding constructing the kind of well-crafted introduction a top-quality essay demands. If you’re writing about an artistic work – like a literary text or a movie – your title might be the best place for a resonant quote that encapsulates the essay question.

You should avoid starting your essay with a quote from a dictionary definition. If you’re asked to discuss a specific term, it’s very likely that term has a specific meaning in your field of study that extends far beyond what any dictionary definition covers, and falling back to the dictionary may simply make your work look ill-researched.

3. How do you reference an essay?

Whenever you reproduce other people’s work – whether through direct quotation or paraphrase – you need to cite it using a referencing system. Familiarity with the referencing systems used by your department is one of the fundamental skills you need to learn as an undergraduate. There are three basic types:

Footnotes (e.g. MHRA, Oxford): Citation information for each quote is referenced by a numbered superscript note in the text, and appears in a separate section at the bottom of the page.
Parenthetical (e.g. Harvard, Chicago, MLA): The author’s name, publication date, and page number of the quotation are given in parentheses in-text.
Numbered (e.g. Vancouver): Each source is assigned a number the first time it is cited, and thereafter each subsequent citation of this source is referenced using the same number.

Keep reading below for more questions and answers on Oxford and Harvard referencing,

4. What is Oxford referencing?

Oxford referencing is a form of academic referencing that provides citation information for sources you’ve used in your essay in footnote form. Whenever you quote or paraphrase a source in the body of your text, you insert a footnote, which has two parts:

A superscript number in the body of your essay, indicating the note the reader should seek out.
A detailed note in a ruled-off section at the bottom of the page, which provides bibliographic details of the work, or works, you’ve referenced.

Footnote referencing systems are used extensively in the arts and humanities, where it’s common not only to provide a reference for the source but also to provide some expanded parenthetical remarks on the context of their arguments, and their relationship to the field as a whole, which are important but would disrupt the flow of the essay if included in the body.

5. What is Harvard referencing?

Harvard referencing is a form of academic referencing that provides brief bibliographic data for citations (author’s name, date, page number if applicable) in parentheses in the body of the essay, allowing your reader to cross-reference to a list of references at the end of your essay. Harvard is a type of parenthetical referencing system, which are most common in social sciences disciplines. They allow you to cite three or four sources at a time with relatively little disruption to the text (since if you’re summarising a particular trend or position in a field your parenthetical reference will look something like “see Smith 1999; Jones 2002; Thomas 2010”) but you’re unlikely to be referencing ten or more sources at a time (as is common in some scientific disciplines, which are therefore better suited to numbered systems).

Want more advice on referencing systems? See How to reference an essay or dissertation using Oxford or Harvard referencing and How to correctly reference a dissertation .

6. How do you structure an essay?

All essays require an introduction, a body, and a conclusion, but good structure requires more than just assembling these basic building blocks. It’s accomplished by establishing a clear sense of purpose in the introduction, and carrying through on your promises. Here are a few quick tips:

Signpost your essay. Set out each item you’ll discuss in your introduction, and gesture back and forth in your body paragraphs so that your reader gets a sense that your arguments are building towards your conclusion.
Transition appropriately between arguments. Make sure your reader is aware that your arguments relate to one another; refer back to principles you’ve previously established and indicate ahead to where you’re going next.
Address counter-arguments. If there are obvious objections a reader might raise to your arguments, address them yourself, and explain why you’re still right! Thinking about possible counter-arguments can help you put your points in the best possible order.

7. What do you include in an introduction?

An introduction to an academic essay should present the context for the argument you’re about to make, clearly outlining the debates in which you’re trying to intervene, and positioning your intervention in relation to the positions of other scholars. You should start out with a broad pitch that captures the wider significance of the argument you’re about to make, before zeroing in on a clear thesis statement (a brief precis of your argument and the evidence you’ll use to support it).

Your broad pitch should be relevant to the topic you’re about to discuss, should base its claims to significance on scholarly/critical debates and conversations. Like all other statements you make in your essay it should be supportable with evidence. Avoid unsupportable generalisations containing phrases like “Throughout history…”. And don’t try to avoid phrases like “in this essay” – your introduction is all about signposting your ideas, and such phrases are perfectly fine for this purpose.

For more on this, see How to craft the perfect introduction to your essay .

8. How many types of essays are there?

There are three broad types of academic essay that you might be asked to write at university:

Expository essays ask you to explain an idea or issue, and are common in first-year modules. You don’t generally need to do much in the way of argument in these essays; the emphasis is on thorough research, and on demonstrating you have a grasp of the material.
Persuasive/argumentative essays are common in exams and in intermediate undergraduate modules. They’ll ask you to consider a point of debate between scholars – and ask you to demonstrate knowledge of both sides of the argument by arguing for one side.
Research essays are common in upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate courses. They require you to synthesise a large amount of existing research and to position an intervention of your own within the context of the research you’ve read.

For more on the different types of essay and what's required for each, see What even is an essay?

9. How do you write an essay plan?

An essay plan is a crucial step on the path to writing a successful essay. It’s where you outline and briefly summarise each of your body paragraphs and arguments, and crucially, the approximate number of words you’ll devote to each argument. It’s more detailed than an essay outline (see question 11 below), and when you draw one up, you need to make sure your essay plan…

Addresses the question posed through an outline of the introduction and conclusion
Draws on the relevant reading you have already gathered
Sets out an argument with different points in each paragraph

What’s particularly useful about drawing up an essay plan before you start writing , is that it acts as a kind of feasibility study for the argument you’re proposing to make. If the various strands of argument you’ll need to prove your thesis add up to 2500 words, you’ll need to seriously refine and narrow your thesis! Similarly, if you’re planning a 4000-word essay but can only think of two or three main arguments, it’s possible you need to broaden out your focus.

A plan is also a great summary document that you can submit to your instructor to ask for feedback and direction whilst working on your essay.

10. How do you write a persuasive essay?

Persuasive essays are most often set as a means of testing that you’ve understood the terms of a particular debate or point of contention in your field, and can argue for one side or the other. The key to writing a persuasive essay is to demonstrate mastery of both sides of the argument, debate, or proposition.

You persuade your audience both by making a convincing case for your side of the argument and by providing convincing rebuttals to counter-arguments from the other side. By giving a fair hearing to both sides of the argument, you demonstrate both the depth of your understanding and an ability to evaluate the merits of both sides of a debate and draw a conclusion based on the weight of evidence.

11. How do you write an essay outline?

An essay outline gives a sense not only of what your main arguments are, but how they fit together. You can move around items in your outline, and nest one beneath the other, until you’re confident you’ve planned the optimal structure. The outline itself is essentially a set of headings and subheadings under which you categorise the main ideas and arguments you want to explore in an essay. It’s best to use a numbered list in your word processing program to create your outline, and use the tab key to indent items appropriately (the application will automatically number first-level points 1, 2, 3…, second-level points a, b, c…, and so on). Once you’ve formulated your initial thesis, you should attempt to distil each argument and sub-argument into a short heading (maximum five words) and assign it a place in the structure.

For further advice, we like this useful guide to creating essay outlines .

12. How do you create a research proposal?

A research proposal serves two main functions: it provides your supervisors/funders/stakeholders with a concise summary of what you plan to do, so that they can evaluate its merits and feasibility, and it provides you with a plan that you can regularly refer back to and, if necessary, modify. Your proposal isn’t set in stone; your research questions and the precise means you use to explore them can and will change as you write, but your research proposal should give a good overview of the following:

Your main research question, and preliminary thesis/ hypothesis
An outline literature review, noting the major influences on your thinking and the major debates with which your project engages
An outline methodology, indicating the theoretical or experimental frameworks and protocols you’ll follow in discussing your thesis
A discussion of the project’s limitations and ethical considerations.

For more on dissertation proposals, this in-depth guide is packed full of advice and information.

13. Can I publish my essay in a journal?

You should discuss this question with your instructor or supervisor. They will often, through the feedback they give you on your essay(s), be the first person to suggest publishing your work if it’s of a high enough quality.

You’ll probably be a Master’s student by the time this suggestion happens, though there are undergraduate student journals – run within universities exclusively for their students, and some that are open – that may be suitable for outstanding undergraduate work.

If you’re a postgraduate student, you’ll be submitting your work to journals that don’t just cater to students but to seasoned academics as well, and it can be a daunting experience to submit work for publication for the first time. But again, ask your instructor or supervisor for suggestions of journals to submit to, and be prepared to take reviewer feedback constructively, and to revise your paper numerous times before it ends up in print.

Find out more about getting your work published in our article Dissertation writing: publishing a dissertation .

14. How do you write a paragraph?

A paragraph should contain one single idea or strand of your argument, and function as a self-contained “building block” within your essay. The structure of a body paragraph should mirror the structure of your essay as a whole. The first sentence or two should introduce the topic you’re going to discuss, the bulk of the paragraph should be given over to the detailed discussion of the topic, and the final sentence or two should work as a mini-conclusion, summing up the ideas you’ve been discussing.

It’s important to use your “mini-introduction” and “mini-conclusion” sentences to effectively transition between ideas – that is, to refer back to your previous paragraph(s) and signpost where your essay is going next, respectively. A well-constructed essay transitions almost seamlessly between paragraphs, with transition sentences used as a rhetorical device to help convince your reader that your arguments relate strongly and coherently to each other.

15. How do you write a five-paragraph essay?

The five-paragraph essay is a standard format of essay often required of first-year undergraduate students. It’s designed to get you accustomed to the rudiments of the introduction-body-conclusion structure, and requires an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion, to prove a single thesis statement.

Because it’s so formulaic, the biggest danger with a five-paragraph essay is that you focus too much on the need for your thesis to contain three main body parts, and not enough on ensuring that these three elements cohere into a single thesis statement.

But know this: the principles on introductions, body paragraphs, and conclusions discussed in this post and elsewhere on our blog apply just as well to five-paragraph essays as to longer-form pieces. Don’t scrimp on the quality of your structure , or the flow of your argument , because you are focused too much on achieving five paragraphs. The general rules of good essay writing still apply.

16. Introductions and conclusions: how are they different?

Introductions and conclusions are the two most difficult parts of your essay to write, and they fulfil related but distinct functions: your introduction states your thesis and establishes the context for your argument; your conclusion is your last opportunity to make the case that you’ve proved your argument, and also to gesture towards the broader significance of that argument, and as such it fulfils a powerful rhetorical function.

It can be helpful to think of the “shape” of introductions and conclusions as the two halves of an egg timer. Your introduction starts out with broad statements about the field before narrowing its focus to your specific argument. Your conclusion starts narrow, recapping the arguments you’ve made and how they prove your thesis, but then broadens out, considering what your intervention might mean to the study of your specific topic and even to the field as a whole.

Our guide How to structure an essay has lots more advice and information on introductions and conclusions.

17. What does 'to what extent' mean?

Whenever you see this phrase, you should approach it as if it’s written in red, flashing, neon lights! It catches a lot of people out, and for good reason.

Simply put, “to what extent” means, how much do you agree with the idea being posed in the essay question. You must always agree – at least a little bit – with the idea and have reasons for it, and be able to say why you disagree with it too (if you do). “To what extent…” questions always involve a statement that offers a partial explanation for a phenomenon, or that is partially true, or is a simplification of some kind. Your answer should therefore always be balanced, exploring both the strengths and weaknesses of the proposition you’re asked to discuss.

“To what extent…” questions test many of the same skills as persuasive essays: you need to show breadth of understanding, balance, and a mastery of exploring competing viewpoints.

If you want to learn more, our article Focus on directive essay words: “to what extent…” offers a deeper insight into how to answer “to what extent” essay questions.

18. Does punctuation really matter?

Yes. Absolutely. The correct use of punctuation demonstrates a mastery of grammar in English (or whatever language you happen to be writing in) and to anyone who cares about language and is invested in its proper use (spoiler alert: this includes anyone who is likely to be grading your essays!), poorly implemented apostrophes, commas, semicolons and full-stops (periods) are likely to be jarring in the extreme. Good grammar – including the appropriate use of punctuation – is about more than just getting the “technical stuff” right: punctuation gives us important cues about how we should read long or complex sentences and, especially if we’re reading quite quickly (which – spoiler alert #2 – the instructors marking your essay are very likely to be doing) give us the information we need to parse out the logic of a sentence.

19. What's a reflective essay?

A reflective essay is a tricky feat to pull off. It requires that you synthesise academic research and personal experience, usually by asking you to comment on how one has impacted the other – and sometimes both at once! Reflective essays deploy many of the formal conventions of normal academic writing, but emphasise use of the first-person (“I”) voice.

Reflective writing is very common in practice-based disciplines like nursing or teacher training, where you’ll be asked to reflect on how theory has informed your practice, and how practice has modified or enhanced your understanding of theory. The trickiest aspect of reflective writing is managing a balance between the formal academic register and the personal narrative voice; it’s easy to become too personal and informal, and forget the need for scholarly rigour in your essay.

Want to know more? See The complete guide to writing a reflective essay .

20. How can I make my writing better?

One goal you should be aiming towards in higher education is to make your writing move beyond reading like that of a new and inexperienced student, and towards that of a seasoned academic. One way you can do this is through better use of vocabulary.

But how does one improve their academic vocab? In a word: read. The best way to learn the phrases, habits and devices that are common in academic writing is to read widely and deeply, but also with discipline. However tempting it may be to gloss over words you don’t understand, you’ll do your writing a big favour if you actively look up any unfamiliar words, either in a general dictionary or (preferably) in a dictionary of terms dedicated to your own discipline. And do pay close attention to turns of phrase and ways of positioning arguments that regularly crop up in academic writing. Chances are that adopting some of these will help you sound like a “real” scholar in no time.

This guide: Essay writing skills: how to build your vocabulary has some great advice if you would like to learn more.

21. How can I avoid plagiarising?

Plagiarism is a cause of great anxiety among undergraduate students, largely because university instructors and departments are much better at issuing threats and dire warnings than they are at actually defining what plagiarism is.

Simply, plagiarism is the act of presenting others’ ideas as your own, whether or not that’s intentional. You should scrupulously cite others when you incorporate their words and ideas into your work, whether that’s through direct quotation or paraphrase.

One of the most important ways to avoid plagiarism is to be a disciplined note-taker. If you’ve noted down someone else’s words and ideas, and failed to attribute them properly or at least clearly note that they don’t belong to you, these could easily find their way into your essays later. And remember: just because it was accidental doesn’t mean it’s not plagiarism!

Take a look at our guide, Playing by the rules: avoiding plagiarism in essay writing , if you want to ensure you steer clear of plagiarism in your work.

22. How do you create a strong argument?

Essays live and die by the strengths of their arguments. The perfect argument is one that is original enough to sustain interest, but robust enough to be supported by evidence. Ask these questions about your argument:

Is it supportable? Be honest with yourself: do the facts actually support the argument you’re trying to make? It doesn’t matter how original or clever your idea; if you can’t support it you’re in trouble.
Is it original? Are you offering a genuinely new take on the topic, or just synthesising what’s gone before?
Can you rebut the counter-arguments? Even if you can find a couple of bits of evidence that support your thesis, that’s still likely to be insufficient if there are several obvious counter-arguments that sweep your interpretation away entirely! If you’re going out on a limb, make sure you can and do address the obvious objections to your stance.

Want to know more? See Essay writing tips: a strong argument .

23. Masters and undergraduate essays – what's the difference?

If you pursue postgraduate studies after you’ve completed your first degree, it can be quite a culture shock. The leap in expectations is quite considerable, as you go from demonstrating you have a good grasp of the core concepts of your discipline to being expected to produce writing of a standard matching that of seasoned academics, or not too far below. Distinction-level Master’s writing is very often publishable in academic journals, and requires you to show mastery of all academic conventions – from referencing to stylistics – and to demonstrate depth of reading, sophisticated understanding of current issues in your field, and original, independent thought.

A more in-depth and insightful answer can be read in our guide: How to write a Masters essay: Masters essay writing tips .

24. How formal does my writing need to be?

“Formal” writing is a highly subjective construct, and everybody you ask has a different idea what it looks like. For example, there are some people – especially in the sciences – who think you should never refer to yourself in an essay (using I, me or my, etc.) or that you should exclusively use the passive voice when reporting the methodology of a study or experiment. For others, navigating around these rules is wholly unnecessary and produces awkward, cumbersome prose.

To some extent, therefore, the correct answer to “what does formal academic writing look like?” is: whatever your instructor thinks formal academic writing looks like. There are some pretty solid dos and don’ts, though. You should avoid using abbreviations and colloquialisms unless they’re in quotations. Examples of this are, “my results were totally unexpected” (the word “totally” is too colloquial and not quantifiable enough) and, “the battle took place on 1st Feb 1892” (“February” should not be abbreviated).

You should do your best to master academic diction: a set of transitional and framing phrases that allow you to, for want of a better expression, sound like a “proper” academic.

Want to know more? For extra guidance, see 10 academic phrases to use in your essay .

25. How do you write a conclusion for an essay?

The conclusion is where you both recap succinctly on the arguments you’ve made and gesture towards the broader significance of your argument, with the rhetorical goal of convincing your reader of both the importance of the question you’ve been answering and the validity of your particular approach to this question! By briefly recapping on your body paragraph arguments and highlighting the ways they support your thesis, you can help to convince a sceptical reader of the validity of your position.

Avoid simply repeating phrases you’ve used elsewhere in your body paragraphs; instead generalise about how the common threads between your points lead unavoidably to your interpretation. You should also discuss the broader implications of the argument you’ve made. Don’t make any unsupportable statements, but if your argument has implications for the field as a whole, don’t shy away from them.

For more helpful advice on writing a great conclusion for your essay, read Your essay conclusion: how to conclude an essay well .

It is always beneficial to have a second set of eyes assess your work for any errors or omissions and many students choose to contact editors to help with the final editing and proofreading of their work . Professional editors hold the relevant expertise to guide you on the correct path to creating a discussion section that is perfectly structured, formatted and ready for submission, helping you to achieve a high result.

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Demystifying the LSAT: A Guide to Its Sections

By Ross Rinehart Mehran Ebadolahi -->

When aspiring lawyers prepare for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), they often focus on the four multiple-choice sections that make up the core of the exam. These sections—Logical Reasoning (2), Reading Comprehension (1), and an Experimental section—are pivotal in determining one's readiness for law school. However, there's also a fifth section, the LSAT Writing, which requires a different approach altogether.

Logical Reasoning (2 Sections)

The heart of the LSAT lies in its Logical Reasoning sections. Test-takers encounter two of these, each comprising roughly 24 to 26 short passages. These passages present arguments that require careful analysis. The task here isn't just to identify the main points but also to evaluate the logic employed, identify flaws, and understand how to strengthen or weaken arguments effectively.

While most passages feature arguments, some focus on factual scenarios, challenging test-takers to draw conclusions or reconcile apparently contradictory information. Mastery of logical reasoning not only boosts scores but also enhances critical thinking skills essential for legal education and practice.

For a deeper dive into Logical Reasoning strategies, check out our…

Reading Comprehension (1 Section)

In contrast to the concise arguments of Logical Reasoning, the Reading Comprehension section immerses test-takers in longer, complex passages. Here, each section consists of four substantial arguments spread across several paragraphs. The challenge lies in extracting key ideas, understanding the structure and tone of arguments, and synthesizing new information with provided facts.

Questions accompanying these passages require deep comprehension and the ability to infer details crucial for answering multiple-choice questions accurately. This section not only tests reading skills but also the capacity to digest and apply information—a skill vital for law school coursework and legal analysis.

Curious about Reading Comprehension strategies? Check out our insightful…

Experimental Section (1 Section)

Amidst the rigor of scored sections, the LSAT includes an experimental section—either an additional Logical Reasoning or Reading Comprehension segment. Unlike the others, this section doesn't contribute to your overall score. Its purpose is to field-test questions for future exams, meaning test-takers must approach it with the same diligence as the scored sections, despite its non-scoring status.

The mystery of its placement—whether it appears as the first, second, third, or fourth section—adds an element of unpredictability to test day. This section serves as a reminder to stay focused throughout the exam, treating each section seriously until the end.

LSAT Writing

The LSAT Writing section marks a departure from the multiple-choice format. It challenges candidates to craft a persuasive essay within a constrained timeframe. Presented with a contentious issue and multiple perspectives, test-takers must formulate a coherent argument supported by provided facts. The ability to articulate a compelling stance under pressure is crucial, reflecting skills needed for legal writing and advocacy.

Unlike the other sections, LSAT Writing can be completed separately from the main exam, offering flexibility but requiring prompt completion to receive official scores.

For tips on mastering the LSAT Writing section, explore our detailed blog article here!

Understanding the LSAT involves mastering its various sections, each designed to assess distinct skills critical for success in law school. Whether dissecting arguments, navigating complex texts, or crafting persuasive essays, thorough preparation is key. By familiarizing yourself with the format, strategies, and resources available, you can approach the LSAT with confidence, knowing you've equipped yourself with the tools to excel.

As you embark on this journey, remember that the LSAT isn't just a test—it's a stepping stone toward a career in law, where rigorous analysis and effective communication are essential. Embrace the challenge, hone your skills, and pave the way for your future in the legal profession.

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Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago

Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact

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Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-warnings-from-democrats-about-project-2025-and-donald-trump

Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

Project 2025 has a starring role in this week’s Democratic National Convention.

And it was front and center on Night 1.

WATCH: Hauling large copy of Project 2025, Michigan state Sen. McMorrow speaks at 2024 DNC

“This is Project 2025,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, said as she laid a hardbound copy of the 900-page document on the lectern. “Over the next four nights, you are going to hear a lot about what is in this 900-page document. Why? Because this is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about “Trump’s Project 2025” agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn’t claim the conservative presidential transition document.

“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said July 23 in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously, and can you believe they put that thing in writing?”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, has joined in on the talking point.

“Don’t believe (Trump) when he’s playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Walz said Aug. 9 in Glendale, Arizona.

Trump’s campaign has worked to build distance from the project, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, led with contributions from dozens of conservative groups.

Much of the plan calls for extensive executive-branch overhauls and draws on both long-standing conservative principles, such as tax cuts, and more recent culture war issues. It lays out recommendations for disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, eliminating certain climate protections and consolidating more power to the president.

Project 2025 offers a sweeping vision for a Republican-led executive branch, and some of its policies mirror Trump’s 2024 agenda, But Harris and her presidential campaign have at times gone too far in describing what the project calls for and how closely the plans overlap with Trump’s campaign.

PolitiFact researched Harris’ warnings about how the plan would affect reproductive rights, federal entitlement programs and education, just as we did for President Joe Biden’s Project 2025 rhetoric. Here’s what the project does and doesn’t call for, and how it squares with Trump’s positions.

Are Trump and Project 2025 connected?

To distance himself from Project 2025 amid the Democratic attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he “knows nothing” about it and has “no idea” who is in charge of it. (CNN identified at least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration who have been involved.)

The Heritage Foundation sought contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations for its policy vision for the next Republican presidency, which was published in 2023.

Project 2025 is now winding down some of its policy operations, and director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, is stepping down, The Washington Post reported July 30. Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita denounced the document.

WATCH: A look at the Project 2025 plan to reshape government and Trump’s links to its authors

However, Project 2025 contributors include a number of high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration, including former White House adviser Peter Navarro and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

A recently released recording of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, showed Vought saying Trump’s “very supportive of what we do.” He said Trump was only distancing himself because Democrats were making a bogeyman out of the document.

Project 2025 wouldn’t ban abortion outright, but would curtail access

The Harris campaign shared a graphic on X that claimed “Trump’s Project 2025 plan for workers” would “go after birth control and ban abortion nationwide.”

The plan doesn’t call to ban abortion nationwide, though its recommendations could curtail some contraceptives and limit abortion access.

What’s known about Trump’s abortion agenda neither lines up with Harris’ description nor Project 2025’s wish list.

Project 2025 says the Department of Health and Human Services Department should “return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

It recommends that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion. Medication is the most common form of abortion in the U.S. — accounting for around 63 percent in 2023.

If mifepristone were to remain approved, Project 2025 recommends new rules, such as cutting its use from 10 weeks into pregnancy to seven. It would have to be provided to patients in person — part of the group’s efforts to limit access to the drug by mail. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to mifepristone’s FDA approval over procedural grounds.

WATCH: Trump’s plans for health care and reproductive rights if he returns to White House The manual also calls for the Justice Department to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act on mifepristone, which bans the mailing of “obscene” materials. Abortion access supporters fear that a strict interpretation of the law could go further to ban mailing the materials used in procedural abortions, such as surgical instruments and equipment.

The plan proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention how many abortions take place within their borders. The plan also would prohibit abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funds. It also calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the training of medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, omits abortion training.

The document says some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involves a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception.

Trump has recently said states should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives. Trump said during his June 27 debate with Biden that he wouldn’t ban mifepristone after the Supreme Court “approved” it. But the court rejected the lawsuit based on standing, not the case’s merits. He has not weighed in on the Comstock Act or said whether he supports it being used to block abortion medication, or other kinds of abortions.

Project 2025 doesn’t call for cutting Social Security, but proposes some changes to Medicare

“When you read (Project 2025),” Harris told a crowd July 23 in Wisconsin, “you will see, Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The Project 2025 document does not call for Social Security cuts. None of its 10 references to Social Security addresses plans for cutting the program.

Harris also misleads about Trump’s Social Security views.

In his earlier campaigns and before he was a politician, Trump said about a half-dozen times that he’s open to major overhauls of Social Security, including cuts and privatization. More recently, in a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump said of entitlement programs such as Social Security, “There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” However, he quickly walked that statement back, and his CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s campaign website says that not “a single penny” should be cut from Social Security. We rated Harris’ claim that Trump intends to cut Social Security Mostly False.

Project 2025 does propose changes to Medicare, including making Medicare Advantage, the private insurance offering in Medicare, the “default” enrollment option. Unlike Original Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans have provider networks and can also require prior authorization, meaning that the plan can approve or deny certain services. Original Medicare plans don’t have prior authorization requirements.

The manual also calls for repealing health policies enacted under Biden, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. The law enabled Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers for the first time in history, and recently resulted in an agreement with drug companies to lower the prices of 10 expensive prescriptions for Medicare enrollees.

Trump, however, has said repeatedly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he will not cut Medicare.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Education Department, which Trump supports

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 would “eliminate the U.S. Department of Education” — and that’s accurate. Project 2025 says federal education policy “should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” The plan scales back the federal government’s role in education policy and devolves the functions that remain to other agencies.

Aside from eliminating the department, the project also proposes scrapping the Biden administration’s Title IX revision, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also would let states opt out of federal education programs and calls for passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to ones passed in some Republican-led state legislatures.

Republicans, including Trump, have pledged to close the department, which gained its status in 1979 within Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s presidential Cabinet.

In one of his Agenda 47 policy videos, Trump promised to close the department and “to send all education work and needs back to the states.” Eliminating the department would have to go through Congress.

What Project 2025, Trump would do on overtime pay

In the graphic, the Harris campaign says Project 2025 allows “employers to stop paying workers for overtime work.”

The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In 2019, the Trump’s administration finalized a rule that expanded overtime pay eligibility to most salaried workers earning less than about $35,568, which it said made about 1.3 million more workers eligible for overtime pay. The Trump-era threshold is high enough to cover most line workers in lower-cost regions, Project 2025 said.

The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888 beginning July 1, and that will rise to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025. That would grant overtime eligibility to about 4 million workers, the Labor Department said.

It’s unclear how many workers Project 2025’s proposal to return to the Trump-era overtime threshold in some parts of the country would affect, but experts said some would presumably lose the right to overtime wages.

Other overtime proposals in Project 2025’s plan include allowing some workers to choose to accumulate paid time off instead of overtime pay, or to work more hours in one week and fewer in the next, rather than receive overtime.

Trump’s past with overtime pay is complicated. In 2016, the Obama administration said it would raise the overtime to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year, about double the exemption level set in 2004 of $23,660 a year.

But when a judge blocked the Obama rule, the Trump administration didn’t challenge the court ruling. Instead it set its own overtime threshold, which raised the amount, but by less than Obama.

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The test is divided into 2 modules, each of which includes questions from all four different domains. What the Reading and Writing Passages Are Like. The passages in the Reading and Writing section range from 25 to 150 words. Passages represent the subject areas of literature, history/social studies, the humanities, and science.
TSI Writing Practice Test
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Read the sonnet and analyze why the poet declines to compare his beloved with a summer's day. A. The poet thinks that summer is more lovely and temperate. B. The poet thinks that the gold complexion of his beloved will be dimmed. C. The poet considers his beloved to be eternal and not temporary like the summer. D.
Opinion and Informational Text Sets: Reading and Writing from One Text
The plan and example essay includes 2-3 body paragraphs. So your students will be writing 4 - 5 paragraph essays. Depending on which you prefer to have your students write, you'll just add/remove a body paragraph. Paragraph 1: Introduction. Paragraph 2: Body Paragraph 1.
Our answers to the top 25 essay writing questions
Address counter-arguments. If there are obvious objections a reader might raise to your arguments, address them yourself, and explain why you're still right! Thinking about possible counter-arguments can help you put your points in the best possible order. 7.
A1 Writing Exercises and Tests
Take a level test Upgrade to pro. Master the basics with A1 writing lessons! Explore our beginner exercises, tips, & examples to build a strong writing foundation in English.
Demystifying the LSAT: A Guide to Its Sections
LSAT Writing. The LSAT Writing section marks a departure from the multiple-choice format. It challenges candidates to craft a persuasive essay within a constrained timeframe. Presented with a contentious issue and multiple perspectives, test-takers must formulate a coherent argument supported by provided facts.
Reading and Writing Essays about History: Mastery Test Results
Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like Which type of historical text typically focuses on a particular topic, integrating primary and secondary source documents to advance an argument?, Which sentence would be an effective thesis statement for a historical essay on the American industrial revolution?, It shows the extent to which the United States was claiming land ...
Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and ...
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about "Trump's Project 2025" agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn't claim the ...