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Welcome to Writing Unleashed: Content and Structure, designed for use as a textbook in first-year college composition programs, written as a brief guide for students, jam-packed with diverse voices, and engineered for fun.

Hello Teachers:

The backstory is pretty simple and obvious: A few of us in my department were tired of not finding a textbook that covered what we wanted in a very brief way. In addition to not finding a book with the “right kind” of information, we were also concerned with price. So, after much thought, and after getting an email that our campus was offering minigrants to fund special projects, we jumped into the open educational (OER) arena. In the summer of 2016, we created Writing Unleashed.

Cut to the Summer of 2020, and Sybil (one of the three authors of the original Writing Unleashed) decides to tweak the original textbook. And that’s the glory of open educational resources – they are fluid and can be remixed and revised. Yay!

Hello Students:

The backstory is that the teacher who put this textbook together wanted flexibility for herself and less costs for her students. She’s hoping you’ll keep this textbook as “free” as possible, and just have it electronically on your devices (save it in Kindle or Dropbox.com or Google Drive, etc.); you can choose – yes, you have choices too! – to head to a copy center on your campus or in your town, and print off this bugger and have it physically with you… we’re hoping to keep that sort of cost down, as well, by keeping the textbook brief.

As you read this textbook, you’ll see that teachers – they might even be your own! – have written certain chapters. We did this so you could see their own writing “in action.” After all, if we’re going to teach you how to improve your writing, we should probably showcase our own, right?