Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [12]
The book provides a view of writing in different academic disciplines and how they vary in their expectations of student writing. Interspersed throughout the text are sections labeled Voices from Across the Curriculum—discussions of disciplinary practices solicited from our colleagues in a variety of disciplines. Although the book respects stylistic difference, we argue that there is an underlying purpose and thought structure that the disciplines share.
Chapter 1
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Introduction: Fourteen Short Takes on Writing and the Writing Process
This is a “HOW TO THINK ABOUT …” and “Where to Look for …” chapter, consisting of a sequence of short takes on topics that are especially helpful to understand at the beginning of a writing course. Although you will find more extended discussions of most of these topics later in the book, we think you will find it useful to have them assembled here in compact, browseable form. Learning to be a better writer is not just a matter of acquiring skills. To a significant extent it involves learning new ways of thinking about what writing is and what it does.
Because the organization of the chapter is modular, you can easily skip around in it to sample what it has to offer. There is, however, a logic to the order of the short takes, which is why the chapter is not arranged alphabetically. Typically, each short take triggers the next. Cumulatively, the short takes tell a story about making the transition to college writing. Some of the entries will be more pertinent for you now than others. Return to the chapter from time to time and browse for concepts and key terms you have come to need.
ORDER OF THE SHORT TAKES
Thinking About Writing as a Tool of Thought
Analysis: A Quick Definition
What Do Faculty Want from Student Writing?
Breaking Out of 5-Paragraph Form
Writing Traditional Papers in the Digital Age
What’s Different About Writing Arguments in College?
Rhetoric: What It Is and Why You Need It
Writing about Reading: Beyond “Banking”
Freewriting: How and Why to Do It
Process and Product: Some Ways of Thinking About the Writing Process
How to Think About Grammar and Style (Beyond Error-Catching)
A Quick Word on Style Guides
How to Think About Writing in the Disciplines
Academic vs. Nonacademic Writing: How Different Are They?
THINKING ABOUT WRITING AS A TOOL OF THOUGHT
Learning to write well means more than learning to organize information in appropriate forms and construct clear and grammatically correct sentences. Learning to write well means learning ways of using writing in order to think well.
The achievement of good writing does, of course, require attention to form, but writing is not just a thing, a container for displaying already completed acts of thinking—it is also a mental activity. Through writing, we figure out what things mean, which is this book’s definition of analysis.
The book will make you much more aware of your own acts of thinking and will show you how to experiment more deliberately with ways of having ideas—for example, by sampling kinds of informal and exploratory writing that will enhance your ability to learn.
As the next few chapters will show, the analytical process is surprisingly formulaic. It consists of a fairly limited set of basic moves. People who think well have these moves at their disposal, whether they are aware of using them or not. Analysis, the book argues, is a frame of mind, a set of habits for observing and making sense of the world.
ANALYSIS: A QUICK DEFINITION
Just about all of the reading and writing you will do in college is analytical. Such writing is concerned with accurate description and with thinking collaboratively (rather than combatively) with readers about ways of understanding what things might mean. The problem is that