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Preface

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    Introduction

    Welcome to Integrated Reading and Writing. This textbook is designed to help you communicate effectively by reading mindfully, writing meaningfully, and analyzing issues critically—all life skills that will help you not only in this class but in all other aspects of your life as well.

    Audience

    This textbook is dedicated to our freshman composition students. Our Evergreen Valley College community is a global village with students representing a vast multitude of cultures, ethnicities, socioeconomic levels, and diverse learning styles. To that end, we have attempted to create a textbook that would best serve your diverse learning styles and ensure your academic success.

    Chapter Outline

    The text is organized into eleven chapters:

    • Chapter 1: Integrated Reading and Writing. This chapter focuses on the integral connection between reading and writing and introduces students to several critical reading strategies such as annotating, highlighting, predicting, summarizing and outlining.
    • Chapter 2: Prewriting Strategies and thesis statements. This chapter focuses on a variety of prewriting strategies such as freewriting, outlining, brainstorming, clustering etc. and in constructing clear and concise thesis statements.
    • Chapter 3: Building the Academic Essay. This chapter discusses the steps in building an essay. It compares the components of an essay being as fundamental as rooms that make up a house. An essay must have an introduction, body and conclusion in order to be defined as an essay, and those areas are developed by the writer.
    • Chapter 4: Finding the Right Words to Write. This chapter concerns diction, or word choice, and how to choose appropriate and meaningful words for college writing settings.
    • Chapter 5: Using narration, Description and Classification. This chapter introduces the major rhetorical modes employed by college writers to approach a composition or prompt at the sentence, paragraph, or essay levels, focusing on narration, description, and classification essays and thesis statements.
    • Chapter 6: Argumentation-"The Academic Argument." This chapter discusses various elements of argumentation. It focuses on the academic argument that students will write in college courses; however, it also discusses arguments that will often be used in social platforms where students will need to use critical thinking.
    • Chapter 7: Researching. This chapter focuses on the research process from selecting a topic, conducting background research and refining the research process to writing an academic research paper in the MLA format.
    • Chapter 8: Writing the Research Paper. This chapter focuses on creating an annotated bibliography, refining the research process, synthesizing and organizing the information in a cohesive research paper.
    • Chapter 9: Reviewing the Basics of Grammar, Mechanics and Success Skills. This chapter focuses on applying conventional mechanics (punctuation, spelling and grammar) to demonstrate proficiency in academic written English.
    • Chapter 10: Revising and Editing for Voice. This chapter contains information about revising, editing, and proofreading with a focus on developing and honing writing voice.
    • Chapter 11: Instructor Resources-Rhetorical Strategies and Instructor Resources. This chapter provides resources for instructors including examples of rhetorical strategies and articles and videos on current thematic topics.

    For the Student

    Each chapter in this text begins with relevant learning objectives and learning outcomes and ends with key takeaways. Following the takeaways is a list of study critical thinking questions and practice exercises. We hope to engage you in reading a variety of genres, writing clearly and thoughtfully, making coherent arguments, creating multimodal presentations, engaging in independent inquiry, and conducting effective research. Additionally, we have included a variety of readings and videos, including articles on global and social justice issues, thus preparing you to be “responsible global citizens” in keeping with our college mission: “With equity, opportunity and social justice as our guiding principles, Evergreen Valley College’s mission is to empower and prepare students from diverse backgrounds to succeed academically and to be civically responsible global citizens”

    We hope you will enjoy this book as much as we have enjoyed creating it for you.

    For the Instructor

    Learning objectives and outcomes can be found at the beginning of each chapter. All chapters are recommended for use in a freshman composition course. However, a review of the learning objectives will help determine which chapters can be omitted for courses on a shorter calendar or courses using additional textbooks.

    At each chapter's end is a list of key takeaways and a set of critical thinking questions and reflection exercises. The study questions may be assigned to test students' comprehension skills. The reflection exercises are meant for students to reflect on how they can transfer their knowledge to enhance all other aspects of their lives. Chapter 11 provides resources for instructors including examples of rhetorical strategies and articles and videos on current thematic topics.