What do David Foster Wallace's essay on wars over usage and Pico Iyer's comma personification have to do with improving students' academic writing? Everything. For all of the attention supposedly paid to Bloom's Taxonomy-with creativity at the top-educators tend to shy away from encouraging students' creative choices in areas where traditional analysis and the critic's style and tone have reigned. While we do not want our students to write inane or empty verbiage, we unintentionally set th...

Holding thought loops, metaphoric maneuvers, startling juxtaposition, and clever catachresis, a guided journal allows students of the art of discourse a place to test the waters before leaving safe harbor.Nancy Dafoe’s guided journal is designed to complement her book Breaking Open theBox: A Guide for Creative Techniques to Improve Academic Writing and Generate Critical Thinking, but it may be used independently from that text by composition instructors and writing teachers interes...

The Misdirection of Education Policy: Raising Questions about School Reform proposes critically important questions about the wisdom of American public education policy and reform initiatives. Laying out the particulars of three policy strands—creation of STEM curricula/schools, expansion of charter schools/privatizing, and teacher accountability/testing tied to job security— The Misdirection of Education Policy exposes complications, contradictions, and deliberate deceptions in these supp...

Teaching English as a second or foreign language is full of challenges: How do you hold students' interest? How do you ensure that they get enough practice to really learn?The Fifty Ways to Teach Them series gives you a variety of drills, games, techniques, methods, and ideas to help your students master English. Most of the ideas can be used for both beginning and advanced classes. Many require little to no preparation or special materials. The ideas can be used with any textbook,...

In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptic...

A classic handbook for anyone who needs to write, Writing With Power speaks to everyone who has wrestled with words while seeking to gain power with them. Here, Peter Elbow emphasizes that the essential activities underlying good writing and the essential exercises promoting it are really not difficult at all. Employing a cookbook approach, Elbow provides the reader (and writer) with various recipes: for getting words down on paper, for revising, for dealing with an audience, for ...

This "Academic Essay Writing Guide" is designed specifically for today's university and college students.  In a clear and simple manner, each chapter outlines the main organizational and structural components that your instructor, professor, tutor, or grader, is looking for in grading an academic essay.  With clear sentence-by-sentence templates, each chapter provides a practical approach to academic essay writing for students in the Humanities and Social Sciences.&nbsp...

Following Common Core Standards, this lesson plan for William Golding’s, "Lord of the Flies" is the perfect solution for teachers trying to get ideas for getting students excited about a book.BookCaps lesson plans cover five days worth of material. It includes a suggested reading schedule, discussion questions, essay topics, homework assignments, and suggested web resources.A separate book is also available that contains a companion study guide to the book.

More than ever in this completely updated edition, The Elements of Expression helps word users "light up the cosmos or the written page or the face across the table" as they seek the radiance of expressiveness—the vivid expression of thoughts, feelings, and observations. Nothing kills radiance like the murky, generic language dominating today's talk, airwaves, and posts. It tugs at our every sentence, but using it to express anything beyond the ordinary is like flapping the tongue to escap...

Following Common Core Standards, this lesson plan for S.E. Hinton, "The Outsiders" is the perfect solution for teachers trying to get ideas for getting students excited about a book. BookCaps lesson plans cover five days worth of material. It includes a suggested reading schedule, discussion questions, essay topics, homework assignments, and suggested web resources. A separate book is also available that contains a companion study guide to the book.

A parent's guide to implementing a rigorous, thorough, and broad educational curriculum for their children based on the classical model." The Core provides an altogether practical curriculum, a handy reference work for busy parents who want their children to enter adulthood fully equipped with the knowledge and skills possessed by responsible citizens, discerning consumers, and ethical selves." —Mark Bauerlein, au...

Whether for high school, college or pleasure creative writing, you need to know the basic elements of the craft. Creative Writing DeMYSTiFieD gives you helpful suggestions for evaluating your work for freshness and originality and offers scores of exercises, techniques, samples and websites to access more. The book introduces you to general creative writing terms and craft as well as genre specific terms and craft elements.Creative Writing DeMYSTiFieD lets you work at your own pace ...