Welcome to composition and rhetoric! While most of you are taking this course because it is required, we hope that all of you will leave with more confidence in your reading, writing, researching, and speaking abilities as these are all elements of freshman composition. Many times, these elements are presented in excellent textbooks written by top scholars. While the collaborators of this particular textbook respect and value those textbooks available from publishers, we have been concerned with disenfranchising students who do not have the resources to purchase textbooks. Therefore, we decided to put together this Open Educational Resource (OER) explicitly for use in freshman composition courses at Texas A&M University. Thanks to a generous grant from Dean David Carlson of the Texas A&M University Libraries, this project became a reality. It is a collaborative endeavor undertaken by faculty in the libraries and English Department as part of the Provost’s Student Success Initiatives at Texas A&M and continues to be a work in progress. Combined, Dr. Terri Pantuso, Dr. Kathy Anders, and Prof. Sarah LeMire have over 30 years of experience in writing and research instruction. Our goal is for students to leave this course as critical thinkers, polished writers, and informed citizens who can engage in civil public discourse. Gig ‘em, Ags!

The thirty chapters in this edited collection were selected from the more than 500 presentations at the Writing Research Across Borders II Conference in 2011. With representatives from more than forty countries, this conference gave rise to the International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research. The chapters selected for this collection represent cutting edge research on writing from all regions, organized around three themes—cultures, places, and measures. The authors report research that considers writing in all levels of schooling, in science, in the public sphere, and in the workplace, as well as at the relationship among these various places of writing. The authors also consider the cultures of writing—among them national cultures, gender cultures, schooling cultures, scientific cultures, and cultures of the workplace. Finally, the chapters examine various ways of measuring writing and how these measures interact with practices of teaching and learning.Edited by Charles Bazerman, Chris Dean, Jessica Early, Karen Lunsford, Suzie Null, Paul Rogers, and Amanda Stansell.

An English language skills textbook to help ESL students acquire communication skills in the community (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) The book is aimed at CLB levels 5/6 focusing on intercultural skills and essential skills: reading text, document use, writing, oral communication, thinking skills, working with others, and computer use.

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.

Welcome to Mindful Technical Writing: An Introduction to the Fundamentals, an open textbook designed for use in co-requisite course pairings of developmental writing and introductory technical writing, or indeed in other lower-division college writing courses that focus on building study skills alongside effective workplace and academic writing skills. It offers a no-cost alternative to commercial products, combining practical guidance with interactive exercises and thoughtfully designed writing opportunities.

This book’s modular design and ample coverage of topics and genres means that it can be used flexibly over semester-long or stretch courses, allowing instructors and students to select the chapters that are most relevant for their needs. By blending new material with reviews of key topics, such as academic integrity, the chapters provide fresh perspectives on matters vital to the development of strong writing skills.

This anthology is an online collection of short fiction created to serve as an accessible and affordable option for college-level introduction to fictions courses. It is part of a growing movement to promote OERs (Open Educational Resources) in order to reduce textbook costs for students. The fiction included in this anthology represents a diverse selection of authors from the nineteenth century to today, and it also contains support material including an introduction, key concepts, literary terminology and literary theories.

This is the full instructor guide for the Ohio Open Ed Collaborative First Year Writing Course

This book presents technical writing as an approach to researching and carrying out writing that centers on technical subject matter. Each and every chapter is devoted to helping students understand that good technical writing is situationally-aware and context-driven. Technical writing doesn’t work off knowing the one true right way of doing things—there is no magic report template out there that will always work. Instead, the focus is on offering students a series of approaches they can use to map out their situations and do research accordingly.

This textbook guides students through rhetorical and assignment analysis, the writing process, researching, citing, rhetorical modes, and critical reading. Guided by Oregon's statewide college writing outcomes, this book collects previously published articles, essays, and chapters released under Creative Commons licenses into one free textbook available for online access or print-on-demand.

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 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.

The Process of Research Writing is a web-based research writing textbook suitable for teachers and students in research oriented composition and rhetoric classes. Instead of focusing on one research paper, I focus on the process of research writing through a series of shorter writing exercises. Students begin by having to carefully think about a topic of research for the semester and by developing a working thesis. They then write a series of shorter essays that explore that topic. All along the way, students are continuing to research and revise their working thesis so that by the end of the term, their thinking about their original topic of research has evolved. As a result, they are not only prepared to write a “traditional” research paper; they better understand what it means to conduct academic research, which I believe is the real goal of an introductory writing course.

This concise and highly accessible textbook outlines the principles and techniques of storytelling. It is intended as a high-school and college-level introduction to the central concepts of narrative theory – concepts that will aid students in developing their competence not only in analysing and interpreting short stories and novels, but also in writing them. This textbook prioritises clarity over intricacy of theory, equipping its readers with the necessary tools to embark on further study of literature, literary theory and creative writing. Building on a ‘semiotic model of narrative,’ it is structured around the key elements of narratological theory, with chapters on plot, setting, characterisation, and narration, as well as on language and theme – elements which are underrepresented in existing textbooks on narrative theory. The chapter on language constitutes essential reading for those students unfamiliar with rhetoric, while the chapter on theme draws together significant perspectives from contemporary critical theory (including feminism and postcolonialism). This textbook is engaging and easily navigable, with key concepts highlighted and clearly explained, both in the text and in a full glossary located at the end of the book. Throughout the textbook the reader is aided by diagrams, images, quotes from prominent theorists, and instructive examples from classical and popular short stories and novels (such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis,’ J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, or Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, amongst many others). Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative can either be incorporated as the main textbook into a wider syllabus on narrative theory and creative writing, or it can be used as a supplementary reference book for readers interested in narrative fiction. The textbook is a must-read for beginning students of narratology, especially those with no or limited prior experience in this area. It is of especial relevance to English and Humanities major students in Asia, for whom it was conceived and written.

The Public Speaking course was developed through the Ohio Department of Higher Education OER Innovation Grant. This work was completed and the course was posted in September 2019. The course is part of the Ohio Transfer Assurance Guides and is also named OCM013. For more information about credit transfer between Ohio colleges and universities, please visit: www.ohiohighered.org/transfer.Team LeadJessica Papajcik                                Stark State College   Content ContributorsJames Jarc                                        Central Ohio Technical CollegeJanny Nauman                                  North Central State CollegeCarrie Tomko                                     University of Akron LibrarianAllen Reichert                                   Otterbein UniversityReview TeamLaura Garcia                                     Washington State Community CollegeJasmine Roberts                               Ohio State University