Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [9]
We have aimed for shorter paragraphs, more heads, and more directive heads. We have sought to make individual chapters browseable by including in the opening paragraphs of each a PowerPoint-like “slide” that lists the key writing procedures in the chapter.
Throughout chapters, our headings also seek to offer browseable advice rather than just stating topics. Readers repeatedly tell us that they like chapters such as Recognizing and Fixing Weak Thesis Statements, Using Sources Analytically, and Introductions and Conclusions, because the heads offer a kind of outline of the chapter’s advice.
We are excited about the new first chapter and its modular format. Reviewers over the years have asked us to move a number of things forward in the book, such as our critique of five-paragraph form. If we were to comply with all of these requests, the whole book would be in chapter one! So we evolved a new first chapter, which takes the form of a series of short takes—previews of key topics in writing and writing instruction that are particularly useful to discuss early in a writing course. Because the chapter’s organization is modular, students and faculty can take from it what they need when they need it. Cumulatively, the short takes tell a story about making the transition to college writing. Among the chapter’s topics are writing in the disciplines, academic vs. non-academic writing, writing about reading, rhetoric, argument, analysis, freewriting, and the place of the traditional essay in the digital age.
The book now has two toolkit chapters instead of one (Chapters 2 and 4), making the book’s central heuristics more prominent, more accessible, and more clearly arranged in a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated skills. The second toolkit pulls uncovering assumptions, reformulating binaries, passage-based focused freewriting, difference within similarity, and “seems to be about X” out of chapters in which they have been buried and uses them to set up the Writing About Reading chapter, which follows.
The book’s discussion of counterproductive habits of mind (much shorter and less like a jeremiad) now appears at the end of the first toolkit (Chapter 2), so that the chapter leads with concrete activities and positive advice before we supply rationale and admonitions.
Writing About Reading is now better foregrounded in the book and its importance is made explicit in the Writing About Reading short take in chapter 1. All of the book’s heuristics are designed to deepen and particularize students’ engagement with written texts. To clarify this fact, we have given our Writing About Reading chapter a new subtitle—“More Moves to Make with Written Texts,” and we have relocated that chapter to Unit I, The Analytical Frame of Mind: Introduction to Analytical Methods from its place in the previous edition next to Conversing with Sources, which was near the end of the book.
The book’s treatment of discipline-specific writing, especially writing in the natural and social sciences, is now more fully described and theorized, and it is supported by many new examples of student and professional writing in disciplines outside the humanities. Much new material has been integrated into the first two chapters of Unit III: Matters of Form: The Shapes that Thought Takes. New and revised Voices from Across the Curriculum are now integrated into the text and into the Contents by topic and discipline. Discussion of writing in the disciplines appears as one of the short takes in our new first chapter. We continue to believe in the importance of helping students see common values and habits of mind in writing across the curriculum as well as differences.
We have added new short and extended examples of student and professional writing that use the book’s heuristics. In addition to the book’s primary extended examples