The best-selling, most flexible rhetoric—now with advice for reading and writing across disciplines
The Norton Field Guide lets you teach the way you want to teach. Short chapters with just enough detail can be assigned in any order. Menus, directories, and a glossary/index all make the book easy to navigate. This flexibility makes it work for first-year writing, stretch, ALP, co-req, dual-enrollment, and integrated reading-writing courses.
This book tends to cover everything, especially if you teach in part of a writing across the curriculum program. I've used it to get my students thinking about other classes and what they'll have to write in those fields in order to make composition more practical. The field guide also has extra readings, chapters about research and style guides, etc. It's really one book that does it all. Also, if you are an instructor, you can get a free handbook to help you develop some lesson plans and a syllabus. Of course, my students feel oh-so clever by pointing out the couple of typos in the text. Sheesh.
Adding 8/2015: I've noticed that the textual analysis section teaches students how to analyze written texts, but all of the example essays analyze "texts," such as the game Angry Birds, the shows The Walking Dead and 30 Rock, and advertisements. Not very helpful...
I had to read this for English Composition 1 class. It's just a normal textbook for English writing. Though it did have some interesting articles in it that we had to read and write about. This was also the textbook used for the second English Composition class. I did not like the fact that much of the second class' reading assignments were repeats of the first.
Bullock provides an excellent analysis of common writing issues and helps readers develop their writing skills. A great introductory undergraduate writing aid.
The only text I've ever used that seems to be liked equally by teacher and students alike. The essays in the back are excellent examples and interesting reading, diverse, well-written, and good for discussion.
"all writing has a purpose..." ... sigh ... if I could turn back the hands of time I'd::: 1.defy parental/sibling demands and select USC instead of UCLA and 2.major in English with a focusing on writing and just WRITE about political science and law :D
One of the best textbooks I have worked with in years. Finally, a text with readings on serious subjects instead of nice, safe, boring material. Having better than expected results with the writing tools included.
this is a reference manual from my English 1010 course. It also has a home on my office desk. Very easy to use reference manual, especially when I need to look up something quickly when writing notes and reports or blogging.