Overview

Essential Actions for Academic Writers is a writing textbook for all novice academic students, undergraduate or graduate, to help them understand how to write effectively throughout their academic and professional careers. While these novice writers may use English as a second or additional language, this book is also intended for students who have done little writing in their prior education or who are not yet confident in their academic writing. Essential Actions combines genre research, proven pedagogical practices, and short readings to help students develop their rhetorical flexibility by exploring and practicing the key actions that will appear in academic assignments, such as explaining, summarizing, synthesizing, and arguing.  Part I introduces students to rhetorical situation, genre, register, source use, and a framework for understanding how to approach any new writing task. The genre approach recognizes that all writing responds to a context that includes the writer’s identity, the reader’s expectations, the purpose of the text, and the conventions that shape it. Part II explores each essential action and provides examples of the genres and language that support it. Part III leads students in combining the actions in different genres and contexts, culminating in the project of writing a personal statement for a university or scholarship application. 

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9780472037964

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"""Overall, we believe Essential Actions for Academic Writing is an excellent textbook for teachers who want options and choice in how they build upon their students' writing skills. . . The book's accessibility, content structure, and relevance to college students are particularly strong. Essential Actions in the classroom will likely guide instructors to be more intentional in building students' understanding of rhetorical decisions, language flexibility, and their agency as writers.""--Journal of Second Language Writing, Ann DeCiccio, Donna McNiff Brown, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper"

Author Information

Nigel A. Caplan is an Associate Professor of English as Second Language (ESL) at the University of Delaware English Language Institute. Ann M. Johns is Professor Emerita of Rhetoric and Writing Studies and Linguistics at San Diego State University.

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