This book is designed for a first college course in poetry. Assuming no prior knowledge of poetry, it guides the student through the most essential aspects of poetics, the tricky question of interpretation, and the importance of form. It also outlines, in several chapters, the ways that poetry has evolved over time.

A freshman composition textbook used by the English Department of Virginia Western Community College (VWCC) in Roanoke, Virginia. It aligns with ENG 111, the standard first-year composition course in the Virginia Community College System (VCCS). The ten chapter headings are:

1. Chapter 1 - Critical Reading
2. Chapter 2 - Rhetorical Analysis
3. Chapter 3 - Argument
4. Chapter 4 - The Writing Process
5. Chapter 5 - Rhetorical Modes
6. Chapter 6 - Finding and Using Outside Sources
7. Chapter 7 - How and Why to Cite
8. Chapter 8 - Writing Basics: What Makes a Good Sentence?
9. Chapter 9 - Punctuation
10. Chapter 10 - Working With Words: Which Word is Right?

This book was created by the English faculty and librarians of VWCC using Creative Commons -licensed materials and original contributions.

This introduction is designed to exemplify how writers think about and produce text. The guiding features are the following:

Every good piece of writing is an argument.
Everything worth writing and reading begins with a specific question.
Improving skills takes practice, feedback, and re-thinking, redoing, revising.
The layout of our book implies there is a beginning, middle, and end to a writing course, but because writing is both an art and a skill, people will find their own processes for learning, improving, and using these skills. Writing processes differ because we are each looking for a workable schemata that fits our way of thinking. Try out a variety of writing processes and strategies, and find what works for you. If you are not uncomfortable on this journey, you simply are not stretching yet. Learning is prickly, awkward, and risky, so if it does not feel a bit unnerving, push harder and farther.

The layout of our book implies there is a beginning, middle, and end to a writing course, but because writing is both an art and a skill, people will find their own processes for learning, improving, and using these skills. Writing processes differ because we are each looking for a workable schemata that fits our way of thinking. Try out a variety of writing processes and strategies, and find what works for you. If you are not uncomfortable on this journey, you simply are not stretching yet.

A quick glance through the book will show you that it deftly covers the basics, which are always important to review as you get ready to build onto your scaffolding. Reminders of terminology that form the foundation of a discipline—as well as explanations, descriptions, and examples of their use in a basic education—are in chapters such as “Critical Reading,” “Writing Basics: What Makes a Good Sentence,” “The Writing Process,” “Punctuation,” and “Working with Words.” These are, of course, fundamentals that you have worked with throughout your education, learning in each course skills and habits that elevate your reading, writing, and thinking abilities. This college writing course will ensure that you take another step up to college and professional writing.

This text is different in its emphasis on research skills and research writing. The form you will learn, the building blocks of that form, the formality, and the sacrosanct crediting of sources is explained here from English professors and our instructional librarian at the college. Leaning on questions that lead to searches for answers that lead to arguments that present your understanding, the chapters “Critical Reading,” “Rhetorical Modes,” and “Argument” will fill out your growing appreciation of and comfort with the research form in everyday life. From the discussion of source types to guidance through the research process to the models of essay deconstruction, you will find that the expectations and language of this text begin with the college-level student in mind.

Working through this text will elevate you into the next stage of writing for a 21st century student and professional.

This is an OER syllabus for EN 101 English Composition I at Miles College. This syllabus was created as part of a HBCU Textbook Transformation Grant awarded to the institution, for the purpose of replacing high cost textbooks with appropriate OERs.

CARL SCHURZ ON THE GUBERNATORIAL CONTEST IN MASSACHUSETTS.

letter from the Hon. Carl Schurz has been received by a gentleman in Boston: written in New York, Oct. 16, 1886

example of persuasive writing

"OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Explore, create, and collaborate with educators around the world to improve curriculum."

OERigin Stories is a series of interviews with women of color working in Open Education. I interviewed six individuals in the Open Movement (faculty, librarians, policy makers) and asked them to share their experience with Open Education. Because I believe Black, Indigenous, Asian, Hispanic, and other women from traditionally marginalized communities have rarely been given an opportunity to share their experiences in the Open Movement, OERigin Stories focuses exclusively on women of color in OER.

While essays and research papers are likely the most common types of writing assignments you’ll receive in college, more and more, students are being expected to write in digital environments. In the 21st century, you’re likely to be asked to create a PowerPoint or Prezi to present the main points of your research paper, or you may be asked to create an electronic portfolio to share all of your work for a semester. Students in online classes will write discussion board posts every week, and some professors are even replacing some of your traditional essay assignments with assignments like photo essays or video essays.

This section is designed to build confidence about what Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) means for the future of education by closely studying the operations, limitations, and theoretical value of a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT. To this end, this section seeks to explain what language modeling is and how this process contributes to an LLM’s tendency to generate inaccurate information. Additionally, this section considers how the design of an LLM—specifically, the collective knowledge it is trained upon—can contribute to the perpetuation of biases. Lastly, this section encourages critical thinking about the value of an LLM from a theoretical standpoint regarding the writing process and collaborative learning. By the end of this section, you should be able to articulate how an LLM like ChatGPT operates, as well as the value and limitations of this design within the evolution of learning.

Author: Mary Landry
Contributors: Gwendolyn Inocencio, C. Anneke Snyder, Jonahs Kneitly
Designers: Irene AI, Shweta Kailani
Supervisors: Terri Pantuso, Sarah LeMire

This peer review resource is part of the Digital Design for Student Success (D2S2) project, a collaboration between Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), Rice University, Texas A & M University, and The University of Texas. Peer review materials are designed for use in any course that uses writing--particularly writing flag (writing intensive) courses in the undergraduate curriculum.

In Placing the History of College Writing, Nathan Shepley argues that pre-1950s composition history, if analyzed with the right conceptual tools, can pluralize and clarify our understanding of the relationship between the writing of college students and the writing's physical, social, and discursive surroundings. Even if the immediate outcome of student writing is to generate academic credit, Shepley shows, the writing does more complex rhetorical work. It gives students chances to uphold or adjust institutional codes for student behavior, allows students and their literacy sponsors to respond to sociopolitical issues in a city or state, enables faculty and administrators to create strategic representations of institutional or program identities, and connects people across disciplines, occupations, and geographic locations. Shepley argues that even if many of today's composition scholars and instructors work at institutions that lack extensive historical records of the kind usually preferred by composition historians, those scholars and teachers can mine their institutional collections for signs of the various contexts with which student writing dealt.

The scientific community must be effective in communicating the results of its work to the public in a way that can be understood and used. The need for this is acute, for the complexity and difficulty of environmental and resource problems require full use of all the knowledge scientists can muster. The wisdom of the actions of both the government and private sectors depends in large part on their understanding of resource characteristics.

The U.S. Geological Survey is uniquely qualified to provide much of the required knowledge about natural resources through its many reports and maps and can be proud of the products of its work. Too often, however, reports are couched in words and phrases that are understandable only to other scientists, engineers, or technicians. But, who, really, are the ones to whom the Survey wishes to convey its findings? Other scientists and engineers, yes. But beyond them, by far a larger audience: teachers, students, businessmen, planners, and Federal, State, county, and municipal officials–in short, the public.

More than 50 years ago former Director George Otis Smith recognized the same problem. His plea for “Plain Geology” was a classic, just as applicable now as it was in 1921. It is herewith reprinted to make it generally available.

persuasion example

In this section, you will gain insights about privacy and confidentiality concerns related to a form of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) known as Large Language Models (LLMs) and, specifically, OpenAI’s policies about ChatGPT.

The full extent of privacy and confidentiality risks in relation to ChatGPT, which relies on collective intelligence for information gathering and dissemination, has not been fully realized. Users should be mindful of OpenAI’s terms of use, particularly as those terms are subject to change. Though OpenAI claims to not share private user information, the language around such statements is vague and contradictory, and there is a strong possibility that personal information may be monitored by human proctors. Moreover, educators who are bound to the legal obligations outlined in FERPA should be particularly concerned about how student privacy could be potentially violated by using ChatGPT and other GenAI technologies.

After reading this section, you should be able to articulate and discuss OpenAI’s significant terms of use and privacy policy, consider the potential privacy and intellectual property violations contained within the collective intelligence paradigm, and communicate your own concerns about privacy and confidentiality in relation to GenAI technologies.

Author: C. Anneke Snyder
Contributors: Gwendolyn Inocencio, Mary Landry, Jonahs Kneitly
Designers: Irene AI, Sweta Kailani
Supervisors: Terri Pantuso, Sarah LeMire

The Process of Research Writing is a web-based research writing textbook (or is that textweb?) suitable for teachers and students in research oriented composition and rhetoric classes.

Putting the Pieces Together: Reason and Writing for Success is a text that provides instruction in steps, builds writing, reading, and critical thinking, and combines comprehensive grammar review with an introduction to paragraph writing and composition; This text is designed as a companion resource to WRIT: Reason and Writing, which is Fanshawe College's introductory writing curriculum.

""Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions -- as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture."

Reading and Writing in College is an open-source textbook designed to support the work of undergraduate writers enrolled in composition courses -- with special emphasis placed on reading and study skills to help today's college writer. Although many of the topics addressed in these digital pages are written with first- and second-year students in mind, the content remains relevant for writers at any stage of writerly development.