Exploring College Writing: Reading, Writing, and Researching across the
Curriculum is a rhetoric for first-year and sophomore composition
courses that uses a constructivist, ethnographic approach to introducing
students to academic reading, writing, and researching. This text will
be especially useful to composition instructors who wish to provide
students with both a general overview of academic discourse and an
introduction to the purposes, audiences, and genres of writing across
disciplines. This textbook works from the premise that the best way to
initiate students to academic discourse is to have them explore academic
literacies using an ethnographic, fieldwork approach to their own
institution. Students are cast in the role of researchers, exploring
their own experiences as college writers and investigating writing in
General Education and in their prospective majors. The book provides
instructors and students sequences of engaging and exploratory "Writing
to Learn" and "Learn by Doing" activities and formal, extended writing
projects that ask students to interview professors, analyze writing
assignments, and reflect on their own reading, writing, and researching
processes and histories. These writing projects connect to students'
interests, experiences, and goals and provide them with a sense of
purpose and audience for writing.
The organization of Exploring College Writing moves students from
reflection to investigation. Part I of the book provides a broad
introduction to academic reading, writing, and researching and
introduces students to the rhetorical situation, genres, and common
college thinking and writing strategies. Part I presents students with
prompts that ask them to explore the similarities and differences
between high school and college literacy and reflect on their own
literacy histories. Part II asks students to think critically about
their reading, writing, and researching processes and to explore
strategies for college reading, writing, and researching processes. Part
II includes prompts that ask students to explore college reading,
writing, and researching processes and practice academic research and
making academic arguments. Part III introduces students to writing
across the curriculum and the idea of disciplines and discourse
communities. Part III asks students to investigate the reading, writing,
and researching assigned in the General Education and major courses at
their campus and to consider discipline-specific ways of writing and
thinking. Unlike other textbooks Exploring College Writing uses
authentic student and professional texts from across disciplines in a
variety of genres such as lab reports, scholarly book reviews,
ethnographies and case studies to guide and inspire the writing process.
