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College Essay Essentials: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Successful College Admissions Essay Paperback – July 1, 2016

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The #1 resource for writing an amazing college essay to help get into your dream school!

Unlock the key to college admission success with College Essay Essentials , a comprehensive and invaluable resource designed to empower students in their essay-writing journey. Packed with expert guidance and practical tips, this must-have book is tailored specifically for high school seniors, transfer students, and aspiring college applicants.

In College Essay Essentials , Ethan Sawyer, a renowned college essay advisor and expert, shares his proven strategies and insider knowledge to help you navigate the daunting task of crafting compelling essays that stand out from the competition. With an unwavering focus on authenticity, creativity, and effective storytelling, Sawyer empowers you to create impactful narratives that captivate admissions officers.

Writing a college admission essay doesn't have to be stressful. Sawyer (aka The College Essay Guy) will show you that there are only four (really, four!) types of college admission essays. And all you have to do to figure out which type is best for you is answer two simple questions:

1. Have you experienced significant challenges in your life?

2. Do you know what you want to be or do in the future?

With these questions providing the building blocks for your essay, Sawyer guides you through the rest of the process, from choosing a structure to revising your essay, and answers the big questions that have probably been keeping you up at night: How do I brag in a way that doesn't sound like bragging? and How do I make my essay, like, deep?

College Essay Essentials will help you with:

• The best brainstorming exercises
• Choosing an essay structure
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• Exercises and tools to help you get started or get unstuck
• College admission essay examples

Don't let the essay-writing process intimidate you. Grab your copy of College Essay Essentials today and embark on a transformative journey toward college admission success!

• Print length 256 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Sourcebooks
• Publication date July 1, 2016
• Grade level 10 - 12
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.64 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 149263512X
• ISBN-13 978-1492635123
• See all details

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About the author.

Ethan Sawyer is a nationally recognized college essay expert and sought-after speaker. Each year he helps thousands of students and counselors through his online courses, workshops, articles, products, and books, and works privately with a small number of students.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sourcebooks; 1st edition (July 1, 2016)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 149263512X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1492635123
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 10 - 12
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.5 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.64 x 8.25 inches
• #5 in Teen & Young Adult College Guides
• #12 in College Guides (Books)
• #20 in College Entrance Test Guides (Books)

About the author

Ethan sawyer.

Ethan Sawyer is a nationally recognized college essay expert and sought-after speaker. Each year he helps thousands of students and counselors through his online courses, workshops, articles, and books, and works privately with a small number of students.

Raised in Spain, Ecuador, and Colombia, Ethan has studied at seventeen different schools and has worked as a teacher, curriculum writer, voice actor, motivational speaker, community organizer, and truck driver. He is a certified Myers-Briggs® specialist, and his type (ENFJ) will tell you that he will show up on time, that he'll be excited to meet you, and that, more than anything, he is committed to—and an expert in—helping you realize your potential.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Ethan holds an MFA from UC Irvine and two counseling certificates. He lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife and their amazing daughter.

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English Composition: Connect, Collaborate, Communicate

(22 reviews)

Ann Inoshita

Karyl Garland

Jeanne K. Tsutsui Keuma

Tasha Williams

Copyright Year: 2019

Publisher: University of Hawaii Manoa

Language: English

Formats Available

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Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by Monica Vidal, Lecturer, Leeward Community College on 12/12/22

The book is most certainly comprehensive. It covers all the topics one could use to teach an English 100 course. It describes in detail what students need to be successful, lays out the writing process, details the different kinds of essays... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The book is most certainly comprehensive. It covers all the topics one could use to teach an English 100 course. It describes in detail what students need to be successful, lays out the writing process, details the different kinds of essays students write, provides tons of examples, describes researching and citing sources, and ends with three appendices which provide more insight into place- and culture-based learning, more assignments, and more resources.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The content is accurate. There is a small bias toward the Hawaiian culture, but that is because this book was written in the University of Hawai‘i system, and making references to the culture on the islands is important for the local students. The examples used in the book are place- and culture-based.

The one error I did come across was in the first chapter where the authors described the use and spelling of words borrowed from other languages. They stated that "In French, the word “résumé” is a short, employment-related document detailing one’s education, work history, and job and people skills." While that is how we use the word now in English, the word means "summary" or "summarized" in French. Otherwise, I did not find other errors.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

This text is up-to-date and not in a way that will quickly make the text obsolete within a short time. It was written in 2019 and there are references to the iPhone X, for example, which is pretty easy to change if need be.

Clarity rating: 5

The text is clear, the prose is accessible, and it provides adequate context for all jargon and terminology. The authors define new words and concepts (rhetoric, intellectual standards, mindset, mechanics, etc.) and make it easy to follow along.

Consistency rating: 5

The text is consistent in its terminology and framework. Each chapter starts with a relatable story, then new concepts and examples, it then finishes with activities and works cited. Students and teachers alike will know what to expect as they move through each new chapter. I like that instead of providing links to resources, which can one day become obsolete, they provide us with the titles of videos that can be looked up. Example: "View the video “Shot on iPhone XS—Don’t mess with Mother—Apple,” posted by the Apple company."

Modularity rating: 5

The text is easily and readily divisible into smaller reading sections. These sections can be easily assigned at different points within the course. There are numerous subtitles and the sections contain no large blocks of text that can overwhelm students. The book is easy to navigate and each chapter can stand on its own if needed.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The structure and flow of the book are excellent. The authors have done a beautiful job of starting the students off with a chapter on college success strategies describing attendance, syllabi, checking emails, attending meetings, managing their time and organization, and working with a growth mindset. They discuss the 9 intellectual standards (clarity, precision, accuracy, depth, breadth, logic, significance, relevance, and fairness). After establishing a strong foundation in these critical areas, the authors move on to the writing process in chapter 2 (prewriting, drafting, revising, editing), essay structure in chapter 3 (introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs), in chapter 4, four kinds of essays are described: narrative, process narrative, evaluation, and persuasion, and finally in chapter 5, the research process and citing sources are covered. There are three appendices, one each on: place- and culture-based readings, online videos and readings, and additional assignments.

Interface rating: 4

There are no interface issues, no navigation problems, or distorted images. As previously mentioned, I liked that instead of providing links to resources, readers are given the titles of videos that can be looked up.

The text is missing an index, but using the "find" feature on the pdf text will help readers find the topics they could be looking for.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I found no grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

This text is culturally sensitive: it uses examples from the local Hawaiian Islands context and dedicates an appendix to place- and culture-based readings.

Reviewed by Anthony Accardi Jr, Adjunct Professor, Middlesex Community College on 12/6/22

I was immediately impressed by the Table of Contents of the text English Composition: Connect, Collaborate, Communicate by Ann Inoshita Karyl Garland Kate Sims Jeanne K. Tsutsui. The “nuts and bolts” structure of the text presents an... read more

I was immediately impressed by the Table of Contents of the text English Composition: Connect, Collaborate, Communicate by Ann Inoshita Karyl Garland Kate Sims Jeanne K. Tsutsui. The “nuts and bolts” structure of the text presents an easy-to-follow guide for students to learn the basics of essay writing. The pleasant surprise is that despite the basic structure the text covers all important fundamentals comprehensively. The text presents students with essential writing steps such as prewriting and editing; Essay structure including proper paragraph construction; Types of Essays including analysis, evaluating and persuasion; and Research Skills including gathering information and citing sources.

In my review I did not notice any errors or inaccuracies.

The material in this book covers the “building blocks” of fundamental essay writing. Addressing the essential elements of writing makes the text relevant as well as a good guide for students to refer to throughout their academic careers.

In my experience I find most students are intimidated by the writing process. In the text English Composition: Connect, Collaborate, Communicate the authors explain the elements of good writing in a clear straightforward manner.

In general, the structure of each chapter in the text is similar, beginning with a brief definition/explanation of the topic followed by more relevant details.

The chapters are short yet comprehensive. They are suitably structured to be assigned as student reading assignments with related writing assignments.

The organization of the chapters creates a logical pedagogical progression outlining the elements of essay writing in a step-by-step manner.

Interface rating: 5

The text interface is easy to navigate and is available Online or as a downloaded PDF or Ebook.

In my review I did not notice any grammatical or syntax errors.

I felt Appendix 1. Placed Based and Culture Based Readings showed that the authors were sensitive to cultural diversity. I found the text inoffensive and appropriate.

This text covers the “basics of essay writing”. The steps by step approach to the text makes it easy to follow the fundamental process to write a good essay.

Reviewed by Angela Hurni, English Instructor, Tidewater Community College on 7/6/22

The textbook is a slim 110 pages and contains the essential chapters of any first-year college composition textbook: College Success Skills, The Writing Process, Essay Structure, Types of Essays, and Research Skills. However, the length of the... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

The textbook is a slim 110 pages and contains the essential chapters of any first-year college composition textbook: College Success Skills, The Writing Process, Essay Structure, Types of Essays, and Research Skills. However, the length of the textbook does not include the numerous hyperlinks that provide additional information and learning opportunities. On the other hand, the textbook is overly reliant on other OER textbooks, namely Writing for Success from Saylor Academy, and one feels as if they are entering a rabbit hole of information without any guidance when clicking on these hyperlinks. The textbook does not contain an index or a glossary. It does contain three appendices with additional readings, multimedia sources, and assignments.

The textbook contains very few typographical or grammatical errors. One page stated, “This is where you can add appendices or other back matter,” so somewhere in the editing process this part of the template was not deleted. Information is accurate and unbiased.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

The subject matter is up-to-date and contains the basic elements of any first-year college composition textbook. However, the textbook contains hyperlinks to other sources that are not up to date. In addition to outdated links, the textbook contains links to other sources or sites that require logins, which creates a dead end because no guidance is provided. Very few hyperlinks are embedded within the text of the chapters. Largely, the hyperlinks are relegated to the end of the chapters within a variety of informational boxes to include headings such as Works Cited, Further Resources, and Sources. Most of these informational boxes contain hyperlinks, so the textbook should be easy to update since the majority of the textbook's hyperlinks are in one of these three locations at the end of each chapter.

The textbook is easy to understand and would be accessible to a student who is taking first-year college composition. Jargon and terminology are given ample context; many times hyperlinks are provided for additional information. For example, a section that covers how to “Use Transitions” provides a definition of transitions and a hyperlink for specific examples of transitions.

I enjoyed the consistent layout of the chapters. The chapters of the textbook have a uniform numbering system. Furthermore, the chapters always start with an Introduction section that contains an image, a list of Learning Objectives, and “A Student’s Story” that helps put the chapter’s content into a realistic scenario. The headings and subheadings are used consistently. The chapters end with a variety of additional informational boxes to include headings such as Works Cited, Further Resources, and Sources. These are also uniform in design and color from chapter to chapter.

The textbook’s chapters are divided into smaller reading sections with consistent headings, subheadings, and use of text effects. Short paragraphs are easy to read and navigate as are the outlines and bullet points. The table of contents allows the instructor to assign chapters out of order with easy-to-use navigational links.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The textbook is organized logically for a first-year college composition course. The student learns about college success skills and intellectual standards before moving onto content-specific information regarding The Writing Process, Essay Structure, Types of Essays, and Research Skills. The chapters provide a consistent path for instructors to use. While the chapter order is logical, the textbook would benefit from providing easy-to-find sample essays within the “Types of Essays” chapter. One must really search to find sample essays for the students to follow.

Interface rating: 3

The textbook is available to read as a PDF, online, or as an e-book. The textbook is easy to use on a laptop or a smaller device like an iPad. The graphics are more attractive on a laptop and the navigation works better on a laptop; plus, a helpful search engine is provided when using a laptop. Some hyperlinks are outdated, while others require a login prompt with no guidance from the textbook. The hyperlinks do not open into new tabs, so reader must click the back arrow in order to return to the textbook. However, if the reader is using a smaller device like an iPad, the reader is not taken back to previous page. Usually, the reader is returned to the beginning of the chapter or to some random page—never where you were in the textbook before clicking on the link. Therefore, a laptop or a desk top computer should be advised to use in the description of the textbook where the format options are given. Images are clean and crisp.

The textbook contains minimal grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

The textbook was published in Honolulu and written and designed by English writing instructors from various campuses in the University of Hawai‘i system. The description of the book says, “The content aligns to learning outcomes across all campuses in the University of Hawai'i system.” As a result, the textbook focuses quite a bit on Hawai‘i. The stories, examples, and jargon are largely from Hawaiian culture. The textbook is not offensive in any way to other cultures; I’m just not sure if the Hawaiian-centric content would have a broad appeal.

Textbook contains the basic topics that should be covered in a first-year composition course. It would be ideal for a semester that is eight or ten weeks long. However, the brevity of the text would prove challenging for a semester that is the typical 15 or 16 weeks long. I would also use it as a supplemental text for a second-year composition course, a technical writing course, or an argumentative writing course because it would be useful as a refresher of the basics that many advanced composition textbooks do not revisit.

Reviewed by Nick Hart, Adjunct English Instructor, Johnson County Community College on 4/21/22

The textbook is only 5 chapters + appendices. In addition, the textbook does not include an extensive grammatical or formatting section. Learning basic grammar and formatting practices are essential skills in first year and second year comp... read more

The textbook is only 5 chapters + appendices. In addition, the textbook does not include an extensive grammatical or formatting section. Learning basic grammar and formatting practices are essential skills in first year and second year comp courses. Regarding the formatting section, I did observe links to valuable websites such as the Purdue OWL, which is a practical bridge.

I did not notice any errors in my review of content. Furthermore, the content is easy to read in terms of color combinations and balancing of thoughtful images with the necessary text.

The content is current and relevant. My concern is the shortened length of the textbook. For the comp texts I use in my courses I'm used to anthologies that might exceed 500 pages + appendices.

The content is easy to view. Furthermore, the text invokes a warm and inclusive tone to it.

Consistency rating: 4

I would like to see more links for writing errors, punctuation, and grammar. I am unconvinced a comp chapter should include a chapter on college success skills. Shouldn't this content be taught in a separate course? Students who take first year comp courses will have a varying degree of abilities, meaning some students will not require content on college success skills.

The length of chapters is accessible for students who are unwilling to commit extensive amounts of time to reading textbook chapters.

Delete the college success skills chapter, and replace with a grammar/syntax/punctuation/writing errors to avoid chapter.

The textbook is easy to navigate, review, and explore.

I did not notice any errors.

See previous comments about inclusivity and warmth.

I could see myself using this book for future comp courses, but I would have to heavily supplement my lessons with additional handouts, exercises, and links. Chapter 4 talks about the different types of essays. I found this section to be somewhat incomplete, considering comp courses can also assign classification papers, cause and effect papers, comparison contrast papers, and so forth. The comp courses I teach require students to write distinctly different papers from start to finish. If the course focuses on one type of writing, (i.e., argumentation but different modes of argumentation in a comp II course) then a text that only focuses on this type of texts would work.

Reviewed by James Thomas Grady, Professor, Bristol Community College on 6/30/21

Provides substantial amounts of varied content. read more

Provides substantial amounts of varied content.

Scholarship is reliable, accurate and timely. Content is well-sourced and attribution is very clear and up front--a nice model for students.

Articles tap into the immediate currency of our times--Some content might need a refresh in a few years.

Clarity rating: 3

Writing is accessible and very clear. Perhaps some pruning/compression in parts. Sometimes the activities are a tad vague in purpose and scope.

It seems like the text has a coherent voice--This is important for students who struggle connecting to a text. There's nothing wrong with having a redundant layout and style when students are engaging with a text over a semester.

Modularity rating: 3

I wish the sections were more "chunked." Some have too many varied topics in one block.

Excellent progressive and developmental approach to stacking content.

Very clear navigation and visual "hamburger" menu.

No errors found.

Selections emphasize college-level literacy and seem bereft of any bias.

I like this text's organization approach in both design and content. The readings are challenging in all the right ways, asking students to demand college-level rigor of themselves in reading, writing and critical thought. I wish the activities had more targeted goals/outcomes for the students.

Reviewed by Judith Hague, Adjunct English Instructor, Bristol Community College on 6/29/21

COMPREHENSIVENESS - The textbook offers a good basic overview of the elements of writing for first year composition students. It is well organized and clear which makes for easy reading. Each chapter consists of a Learning Objective which... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

COMPREHENSIVENESS - The textbook offers a good basic overview of the elements of writing for first year composition students. It is well organized and clear which makes for easy reading. Each chapter consists of a Learning Objective which indicates the chapter's focus. The objective is followed by a student story. There are also exercises at the end of each chapter and an additional resources section for reading as well. An appendix is located at the end of the textbook which consists of place based and culturally based readings as well as online videos and additional readings. I would suggest that many of these videos and readings may have engaged students more by placing them throughout chapters in the text.

I found this text to be very accurate throughout. I am not aware of any errors.

This is a basic first year writing text, and the content is relevant today and may well be in the future. However, it can easily be updated if the need be.

I found this text very clear, and the language very easy to read .

The chapters are arranged in a pattern and the terminology is equally consistent as well.

The text can be broken up into smaller units, and the readings can be realigned with different subunits without any difficulty.

This text was very well organized and the material was clear and logical.. The book was broken down into five chapters and 3 appendixes. Each chapter started off with a Learning Objective, followed by a Student Story, an activities section, and reference section.

The text easily transforms into an e-reader, and the pdf version is easily downloaded and read without distortion.

I did not find any grammatical errors in this text. It seemed to be very well edited.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

The text has examples from the Hawaiian culture because it was created for a Hawaiian University and its students. It also has an appendix which consists of culturally based readings that provides an inclusion of ethnicities in the text.

COMMENT: This text is brief, easy to read, and well organized. It offers a good overview of the elements of writing for first year college students, and it is an OER textbook which makes it free and affordable for students. It can easy be supplemented by handouts, readings, and videos to enhance the student's learning and more actively engagement them as well. I am really impressed with what the authors of this text did in creating it in only three days.

Reviewed by Alexis Teagarden, Associate Professor & Director of First-Year English, Massachusetts Department of Higher Education on 6/29/21

First-Year Writing (FYW) textbooks grow increasingly expensive, with their additional online platforms and expanding list of topics covered. 'English Composition: Connect, Collaborate, Communicate' by Inoshita et al. provides a scaled-down set of... read more

First-Year Writing (FYW) textbooks grow increasingly expensive, with their additional online platforms and expanding list of topics covered. 'English Composition: Connect, Collaborate, Communicate' by Inoshita et al. provides a scaled-down set of materials, addressing core writing concepts and common classroom problems (e.g., email missteps). The authors’ knowledge of first-year students’ typical missteps speaks to their FYW experience, a welcome background.

The textbook primarily reads like a series of concise lectures, which present students with important concepts and core vocabulary. It touches on central ideas in Rhet/Comp and Writing Studies, such as discourse communities and writing as a recursive process. It takes a charitable view towards common plagiarism issues, framing patch-writing as a novice-writer issue; it is perhaps not so kind to the K-12 system seen to produce such writers.

The chapter on research skills struck me as the least comprehensive, praising the importance of ongoing research rather than providing concrete ways students can successfully develop lines of inquiry. But that is an issue in publisher textbooks, too.

Content appeared accurate and error-free. Since multiple pedagogical approaches for teaching English composition exist, a book this concise could not represent them all. So it does present a specific approach rather than cover all of possible ways of teaching.

Some Writing Studies faculty may argue with the process-oriented, traditional approach this text takes; it does not advance cutting-edge assignments or pedagogical approaches. However, that might contribute to the text's longevity. Its approach remains a common one across U.S. universities, one unlikely to change anytime soon. The modular design of chapters also opens the opportunity to add new material without rewriting the entire book.

Clarity rating: 4

The writing avoids overuse of jargon, assuming a primary audience of novice/first-year writers.

However, I found the book more often tells students what to be than shows them how to be it, and I think that could result in some clarity issues. Students, for instance, are told “Conscientious college writers begin thinking about and researching essay topics immediately after being given the assignment.” But what “thinking about” assignments means is not unpacked. While chapters offer activities, they would likely require more scaffolding on the instructor’s part than provided, since the textbook often does not provide sufficient illustration for a novice.

Some principles are modeled or operationalized. When discussing letters of reference, the authors provide a detailed breakdown of how to write the necessary “formal email” request. The supplementary materials at the end also provide an OER list of readings focused on place (here, Hawai‘i ) and more detailed activities and assignments. None, however, provide evaluation criteria or means of assessment. Making full sense of what the text means will require work by the instructor on behalf of the students. Most classes benefit from the instructor bringing a textbook to life, though, so I do not see this as a major issue.

Most chapters follow a similar pattern. They open with stories about students, each having a different background and corresponding writing problem. The diverse representation of college-goers might help more readers find themselves in the text or broaden ideas of what a college student can be.

Chapters end with a Works Cited box and (re)linked references. This practices what the book preaches. OER references are linked within the text as well, simplifying things for the user, e.g., the section on Dweck’s growth mindset links directly to her Ted Talk. Some chapters also provide links to student models, published in the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa’s undergraduate journal.

Terminology appeared consistent.

This text appears designed to support modular as well as linear use. Since chapters focus on a different aspect of writing and use different framing stories, instructors could assign chapters out of order without confusing students. Chapter divisions will be familiar to most first-year writing instructors, as they follow a common division of tasks (college skills, the writing process, researching, etc.).

The modular nature and patterned chapters creates an organized text. Since the chapter topics are quite big, ways of navigating within them is important. The clearly named and linked sub-sections accomplish this.

The open-access platform offers an easily used online ebook. The downloaded pdf version seems slightly less elegant in format, but no issues actively impede use.

No errors impeded my reading.

I saw nothing that would concern me while teaching. The vignettes depict a variety of students engaging with writing and writing struggles; this conscious choice does good work expanding the image of who goes to college and who gets to be a "good writer". Examples mostly arise from the authors' local context, and faculty elsewhere might find it useful to swap in models from their local context.

Overall, 'English Composition' offers few of the bells and whistles I associate with for-profit first-year composition textbooks, which now seem as highly-designed as a spaceship. This is not necessarily a detraction. I find instructors often prefer to create their own explicated activities, detailed models, and discussion prompts. Such activities also work best when tailored to individual class needs. So while 'English Composition' does not provide a complete plug-and-play curriculum, it’s also unlikely instructors would need one.

What this textbook does offer is concise overviews of standard Rhet/Comp and Writing Studies’ concepts, saving faculty the time of creating learning materials on them or writing up corresponding mini-lectures. The book would work well as a background text, to give students an overview in advance of an activity or application. It could also serve as a reference for assigned homework.

I’m grateful for the authors’ work developing this book and for their generosity in sharing it as an open-access resource.

Reviewed by Leah Van Vaerenewyck, Visiting Lecturer, Framingham State University on 6/23/21

The text offers a neatly organized and comprehensive index and appendix materials. The introductory chapter is well-intentioned with tips for effective communication in college, but it also assumes that all professors have the same... read more

The text offers a neatly organized and comprehensive index and appendix materials. The introductory chapter is well-intentioned with tips for effective communication in college, but it also assumes that all professors have the same standards/expectations for communications from their students. For example, I do not need an email from a student if they are going to miss a class; they are adults and my courses establish the expectation that they get themselves caught up independently. I do not need or want to respond to their personal issues; however, the sample email on p. 5 establishes the expectation that students send an email for every absence. One big missing piece in this text is any attention to citation styles. They are mentioned briefly at various points throughout the text, but no citation style is given a full treatment. The text also advocates for citation managers, but experience shows that students who rely on those generators have very little understanding of how to execute a citation and do not develop an understanding of the difference between a journal article title and the name of the journal itself (for example). Many professors caution students against these "short cuts" and this text would undermine that advice. A great strength of each chapter is the blocked out learning objectives. This is a useful guidepost for students as they read.

Content Accuracy rating: 3

The text is appealing because it is brief, but it tries to do too much in too little space. For example, Section 1.3 on sentence clarity is underdeveloped and could potentially give students the idea that modifiers and punctuation are the only considerations that matter when evaluating sentence clarity. A separate section could cover this more thoroughly, or the authors could leave the subject out all together, allowing the professor to select appropriate handbooks or other ancillary materials. There are some font inconsistencies throughout that are distracting but don't hinder understanding (for example, the penultimate bullet point on page 17)

The text is generally easy to follow and content will remain reasonably relevant.

The text takes a very basic approach to all its subjects, making it appropriate for a first-year college student, specifically first-generation or academically underprepared college students. Sometimes, though, this simple approach leads to a lack of clarity. For example, on page 85, there is some discussion of A Word About “Drive-By” Citations (which may point to an intellectual honesty issue, since this sounds a lot like Graff & Birkenstein's hit-and-run quotation). In any case, the idea is introduced, but not clarified. Students would need to see an example (or many) of this sort of dangling quotation and its antithesis to develop an understanding of how to sufficiently connect sourced material to student ideas or to other sourced material (by way of synthesis).

The text's chapter structure and tone are consistent throughout. The text has a consistent treatment of rhetorical analysis and considerations throughout, making the concepts introduced here easy to translate/apply to multiple kinds of assignments in the composition course.

Smaller sections of the text could be assigned effectively without losing much. One strength of the text is its reference to outside sources. Although links often become dated, it might be worth providing some hyperlinks to resources that can be reasonably expected to remain stable for a few years or more.

The TOC and learning objectives for each chapter are strong organizational features. The headers and sub-headers are consistent, though they could be more visually appealing to assist in scanning/navigation. The discussion of structure in the writing process and in the editing chapters could be reorganized to a consolidated, single discussion of structure.

The text is very easy to navigate and is visually simple.

The text is grammatically sound.

There are culturally diverse readings/considerations included in the appendix materials, but little to no attention paid to linguistic diversity or culturally specific/relevant pedagogies throughout.

Reviewed by Julie Odell, Associate professor, Community College of Philadelphia on 6/22/21

First, the college success chapter should include specific tips on annotation. Also, the growth mindset has become controversial for a number of reasons (it's a deficit ideology, ignores the material and emotional conditions of students' lives,... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 2 see less

First, the college success chapter should include specific tips on annotation. Also, the growth mindset has become controversial for a number of reasons (it's a deficit ideology, ignores the material and emotional conditions of students' lives, and research doesn't support its success in student learning outcomes). Even so, this textbook merely summarizes it without giving students strategies to develop a growth mindset.

The section Intellectual Standards for Quality will overwhelm many students in the introductory chapter (or they will skip it altogether). The language and tenor are also too formal. The standards themselves would be better woven through the chapters and written in more of an advising tone. They are great ways to evaluate an essay when a student is at the editing stage.

Letters of recommendation instruction does not belong in the first chapter--the textbook should stick to academic essay writing and maybe include this as an apendix. Also, letters of rec. covered in First Year Experience courses at most colleges.

English Composition teaches text-based academic writing at most schools. In the chapter on the writing process and essay structure, activities ask for personal essays on non-academic topics. I would LOVE to have seen some real-world essay prompts for text-based assignments, even from different disciplines as English comp courses serve students' future writing-intensive courses. Also, citation is tacked on at the end, briefly, while it should be integrated throughout.

In the chapter on the writing process, the writers emphasize drafting an essay in 75 minutes and offer no other possible strategies. I find most of my working adult students end up writing their drafts in pieces as they organize their time, which can be a successful drafting strategy. Or else they spend two hours or one hour. Why 75 minutes here? I'd only teach a 75-minute draft process for a timed in-class essay. Also, for the free writing activity, it would be great to ask students to free-write about something specific as that will be the case most often. It's rare they will be able to free write about whatever is on their mind and then draft an essay on a specific prompt.

As for essay structure, the chapter asks for a thesis that "must present an argument," which just isn't accurate for many prompts. It sounds like every assignment will be to write an argument essay. Also, a thesis statement is often more than one sentence. In the section on weak thesis statements, it would be great to include a revision of each to make it a strong thesis statement.

Then it recommends body paragraphs that all support that thesis, sounding much like the five-paragraph essay. In truth, English comp prompts can ask for all sorts of combinations of rhetorical moves (requiring more complex thesis statements). Also, this should introduce citation and use of source material, as most academic essays will require that. Again, some real-life academic essay prompts would be great here, as well as strategies to address them.

As far as the author's audience, in truth, the audience for academic writing is professors and other students. Any sort of "letter to the editor" model is not academic.

Needs much more on language usage.

Also, I realize instructors from the University of Hawai'i wrote this, so the examples of code-switching are culturally relevant to them, but for much of the country, code-switching is used by Black students, Latinx students, Asain students, and students from all over the world.

The section on editing could use some specific strategies, like reading out loud, having the word processing program read the essay out loud, printing and working off hard copy, etc.

As for grammar, "Most college writers struggle with only one or two main grammar blindspots" just isn't true. Also, there is such specific instruction on punctuation. I'd like to see the same for sentence boundary issues, passive versus active voice, even capitalization, which, in the age of texting and social media, is chaos.

Also, the section on rhetorical modes is a bit too pat. Most real academic essay prompts ask for a combination of rhetorical moves and often don't identify themselves as a specific mode. It would be great to see more about combinations of modes, and connection to actual academic essay prompts. Also, the activities for each rhetorical mode were too simplistic and not academic. "Evaluate a restaurant" is not an appropriate prompt for a college-level writing course.

Finally, at most schools, English composition and research writing are two separate courses. And the section on research skills is rushed anyway. Again, I believe use of sources, citation, APA versus MLA, and essay format need to be integrated into earlier chapters.

See comments above--in several areas, I found content inaccurate in terms of what happens in English comp courses.

Because I think the content does not address enough of what's required in academic writing, I can't speak to this.

I found the prose too formal, and, especially in the first chapter College Success Skills, too scoldy and too much "you must." I wonder why this wasn't written in second person to address the student directly. It has a "sage on the state" quality and needs a more "guide on the side," student-centered tone.

The text is consistent.

The textbook is well-organized and is visually pleasing with plenty of white space and attractive, though generic, photos.

As I wrote above, I believe the use of source material and citation needs to be integrated throughout the textbook.

The book's interface is clear.

The grammar is excellent.

Code-switching needs to include various races and ethnicities. Growth mindset can be exclusionary, ignores students' realities, trauma, previous educational experiences, and so can be racially problematic. The tone of the text, particularly the first chapter, often sounds authoritarian and too stern, too "sage on the stage." It also ignores the fact that 50% of all students today are first-generation. I believe this requires a more supportive tone, and, again, more of a "guide on the side" tenor. For example, "Speaking of 'presence,' students must be physically, psychologically, and intellectually present in class each period to learn everything they possibly can" is so not great as instruction (sounds like an old-school non-student-centered syllabus) and holds students to an ideal they may have never encountered and may not be possible at all times. There is a mental health crisis on college campuses--pre-pandemic, 87% of college students felt overwhelmed by all they had to do, 66% felt overwhelming anxiety, 56% felt things were hopeless and 13% seriously considered suicide. Imagine post-pandemic! A chapter on college success absolutely must address this and do so with kindness, which means telling students how to manage stress, depression, and access mental health services.

Reviewed by Tabitha Espina, Assistant Professor, Eastern Oregon University on 6/14/21

The range of the text is particularly impressive. The first chapter consists of College Success Skills that are relevant to many first-year students' experiences. I liked that the text explicitly framed success in college with a narrative of... read more

The range of the text is particularly impressive. The first chapter consists of College Success Skills that are relevant to many first-year students' experiences. I liked that the text explicitly framed success in college with a narrative of student experience, to show that these concerns are not isolated and rather address an entire community of first-year college students. Moreover, practical tips like "presence" and attendance, how to write an email, how to read a syllabus, time management, and even civil discourse are explored. Often I have to use multiple sources to address these different skills and topics, but I appreciate that these all can be found prefacing this text. What I found particularly helpful in the first chapter was the description of intellectual standards and terminology related to the fields of rhetoric and composition. Intellectual standards are described to show what type of writing is associated with quality and how writing is typically evaluated. However, I would have liked if "standards" were framed as subjective, reflecting the values of a community or institution, rather than primary criteria. I think it is important not to refiy assumptions of deficiency, and a decolonial pedagogy recognizes multiple meanings and ways to arrive at those meanings--even if they are not recognized by standards of the dominant culture. However, this is a small concern compared to the other important terms discussed in this chapter. Rhetoric is often not discussed, much less defined, explicitly in first-year composition, but the descriptions given in this text are given necessary context and explanation. Moreover, I often teach rhetorical analysis in my composition courses, and many students lack familiarity with the rhetorical appeals. I like that the rhetorical appeals are outlined in this first chapter, so that students have a reference readily available to conduct their analyses. The second chapter demonstrates the processual nature of writing, moving from ideation to publication or sharing. In addition to the process, I like that a genre analysis is available in the third chapter, wherein the different parts of an academic essay are given specific focus and direction. I like that I have a resource to provide students that allows them to look at the composite parts and see the coherence, in order to become familiar with the genre of an academic essay. In addition to parts and process, the fourth chapter further evaluates genre by rhetorical modes, allowing students to see the multiple purposes, patterns of development, and approaches of an academic essay. Finally, the fifth chapter is especially useful in outlining the core principles and processes of research, which are easily adaptable to the different research style sheets, like MLA, APA, and Chicago. I find that many of my students do not know how to begin the research process, and I appreciated that topics such as time management and properly citing sources to avoid plagiarism are discussed in clear, descriptive detail.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

The information is highly accurate and synthesizes topics in contemporary composition, such as that related to process theory, code-switching, counterargument, rhetorical appeals, and civil discourse. I would, however, have liked to see more on linguistic diversity/translingualism, pluriversality, or language/discourse communities related to diverse student language experiences. Nevertheless, the online citation management tools described, for example, are those still commonly utilized by students. Some cited material is as recent as 2020.

By providing multiple chapters that describe the function and genre of an academic essay, the text remains relevant. Chapter 2 describes the processual nature of the composing process and how to approach the various steps in writing an essay that adheres to what the text calls the “nine primary intellectual quality standards” (1.3) of clarity, precision, accuracy, depth, breadth, logic, significance, relevance, and fairness. Chapter 3 describes the conventional components of an academic essay. Chapter 4 looks at rhetorical modes and patterns of development, with particular focus on those most often encountered by first-year writing students: narrative, evaluative, process analysis, and persuasive rhetorical modes. Chapter 5 provides research guides and principles that can be applied to specific disciplines. The college success skills are practical and can be applied throughout a student’s academic career.

The text is highly accessible. Terminology from the fields of rhetoric and composition are clearly defined, provided context, and also often framed in student narratives that illustrate the relevance of these terms. Additional resources are linked to provide additional context or clarification.

The text is consistent in both tone and content. Chapters are prefaced with an introduction that includes a visual, foregrounds the significance of the topics discussed, and outlines specific learning objectives. Subchapters have activities and sources specific to the content. The framework is undergirded by the “nine primary intellectual quality standards” (1.3) of clarity, precision, accuracy, depth, breadth, logic, significance, relevance, and fairness, and the language of the quality standards are used consistently throughout.

The text is logically divided with clear subheadings that guide readers’ understanding of the topics presented within subchapters. The chapters, themselves, can function independent of one another and do not need to be read in succession in order to be understood. Furthermore, subchapters can be assigned individually, as each has its own contexts and topics, and many have their own activities.

The text follows a clear, logical organizational structure. Prefacing the text with college success skills addresses issues of preparedness that underlie success in writing courses. The organization of the chapters reflect a contemporary philosophy of composition by positioning writing courses within the larger context of college success, then discussing a processual approach, then describing the conventional genre, then addressing multiple rhetorical modes, and finally presenting the conventions of scholarly research that make writing public and accessible. This organization moves from broader to more specific concerns.

The interface is highly effective. Visuals are utilized that compliment the text and are representative of a diverse student body. Learning objectives and activities are positioned in colored boxes, and sources are set off and hyperlinked in a bottom box. The collapsible Table of Contents makes the text easily navigable. My least favorite visual, however, was that used as the cover, as I do not feel it fully represents the vibrancy of the text’s content and style.

I did not observe any grammatical errors throughout the text.

This book was most impressive to me because of its culturally responsive and culturally sustaining approaches to the teaching of writing. The visuals and stories reflect a diverse student body and experiences specific to the context from which the text emerged, aligning specifically to learning outcomes across all campuses in the University of Hawai'i system. I most appreciated the Appendices, which include place-based and culture-based readings that are geographically significant, online videos and readings relevant to the Hawai’i and Pacific context, and suggested assignments that are culture-based, using “the culture, ethnicity, language, and traditions of people groups as engaging and relevant approaches and topics” (Appendix 3). These Appendices are relevant and useful to my own instruction with Asian American and Pacific Islander students.

I am grateful for the existence of a text that is so culturally situated and attuned to the needs of students within its context. I hope that similar texts might emerge from other Pacific Islands.

Reviewed by Sharon Graham, Instructor, English Composition, Fort Hays State University on 5/21/21

This text includes useful material for all main areas of typical first-year college English composition classes. In some ways, it feels like an expanded outline that provides a solid foundation on which to elaborate. I, for one, appreciate the... read more

This text includes useful material for all main areas of typical first-year college English composition classes. In some ways, it feels like an expanded outline that provides a solid foundation on which to elaborate. I, for one, appreciate the relative simplicity of the text while at the same time realizing the need to supplement (which I do anyway even with bulkier textbooks). The part where I would like to have seen additional content is the section on editing. Although an exhaustive list of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and other language items that might require a writer's attention is nearly impossible to produce (and really not desirable), the section in the text seems to be rather "hit or miss," especially when it comes to the table of examples. In addition, the text is missing an index and glossary.

The bulk of content appears to be accurate and unbiased. However, a few of the hyperlinks are either broken or link to the wrong page. For example, the link “Essay Development: Good paragraph development: as easy as P.I.E.” under "Further Resources" in section 3.3 is broken. Under "Further Resources" in section 4.5, there is no link to the "Ethos, Pathos, Logos" video, and the link for the first sample persuasive essay takes you to an unrelated website.

As previously mentioned, the main content reflects traditional first-year composition classes and is not likely to change anytime soon. The writers include several examples that have more direct relevance within a Hawaiian context, but not exclusively; the key material is relevant with plenty of room to adapt to different environments as necessary. Some may question the inclusion of "College Success Skills" in the first chapter, but since first-year writing classes are generally intended to contribute to students' overall success throughout their course of study, I think the information is relevant even if it is a review for some students. The majority of the students I currently teach are online-only and do not take the typical "first year experience" class required of on-campus freshmen. In addition, they often have been away from the academic environment for a number of years; thus, starting off with some basic skills for student success would be beneficial.

The language of the book is clear and approachable. It does not use intimidating language, but neither does it seem to talk down to students. Although there is no a glossary, many of the more technical terms are defined in context.

The layout of the text is mostly consistent. Chapters begin with a list of learning objectives followed by "A Student's Story" section. Consistent font sizes/styles are used within chapters to identify section headings, main content, etc. An "Activities" box is included for most (but not all) sections. One area of consistency that might be improved is the use of "Works Cited" at the end of some sections and "Sources" at the end of others; section 3.3 actually includes both (I think the writers are perhaps trying to distinguish between smaller bits of cited material and larger portions of information from a Creative Commons source, but this could be a little confusing especially to students).

The book's modularity is one of its strong points. I felt the content was divided into appropriate chunks that could be easily assigned and referenced.

I found the organization to be logical, very similar to what I follow in my own teaching. One detail I especially appreciated in section 5.3 in the "Research Skills" chapter is the discussion of Works Cited/References pages before in-text citations; as the text itself states, "The information in the in-text citation will be whatever the first word is in the Works Cited entry. For that reason, it can be easier to add in in-text citations after the Works Cited page has been created."

The eBook and online interfaces are easy to navigate for the most part. Wherever you are on a page, there is an arrow that will take you back to the top where you can access the table of contents and the corresponding links to different chapters and sections of the book. This is true for the mobile experience as well. I appreciate having a PDF version available, but there is some wasted space (although as another reviewer pointed out, it is easier to search the PDF version).

I did not find any glaring grammatical errors.

The book often incorporates examples from the Hawaiian culture, which is appropriate for the context of its writers. I don't think these locale-specific examples are necessarily a problem to include; rather, they can provide opportunities to discuss the importance of audience among other things. Even more, I see them as a model for instructors to follow in either inserting examples of their own that might reflect the local college context or asking students themselves to share examples that reflect their specific cultural background.

Overall, I found this text to be a viable OER option for first-year college writing. It provides a suitable basic foundation in terms of content and organization. The writers include several practical ideas and "tricks" for students throughout the chapters.

Reviewed by Kole Matheson, Lecturer, Old Dominion University on 5/16/21

The text offers a comprehensive overview of the current-traditional approach to English Composition. The genres explored in the text are typical of “first-year English” classes of the last century. Furthermore, the text accounts for established... read more

The text offers a comprehensive overview of the current-traditional approach to English Composition. The genres explored in the text are typical of “first-year English” classes of the last century. Furthermore, the text accounts for established learning outcomes of the field, which include information literacy, writing as a process, and knowledge of grammatical and citation conventions. The text exceeds expectations of comprehensiveness in that additional sections on college success skills are included, which is not typical of a current-traditional approach to writing.

The text accurately reflects the current-traditional approach to the teaching of composition. The content therein aligns with other textbooks in the field that deploy this approach to freshman writing. There are no factual errors present in the text.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 2

As the text reflects the century-old approach to the teaching of college composition, its relevance is waning. Countless textbooks are published in the field that explore the current traditional approach to freshmen writing, which leaves the reader wanting for a more immediate contribution. Emergent practices in the field are not treated by the text; rather, the established approach to current-traditionalism is rearticulated for an open access audience.

The text is written clearly and concisely. Especially helpful are the graphic organizers, example outlines, and activities that aid the reader in understanding and applying the content of discussion.

The text is consistently designed and user-friendly. Section headings, subheadings, bulleted points, reflective conclusions, and “further resources” offer a consistent structure within each chapter of the text. This consistent and predictable design enhances the readability and accessibility of the content.

Modularity rating: 4

The text’s modularity is sound. The various chapters could be read sequentially or in isolation. Depending on the instructor’s preference, the chapters could be presented from cover-to-cover or in some other sequence that serves the goals of the course.

The text's organization is typical of the current-traditional approach to writing. In fact, the text follows the directions it prescribes to students in that a clear writing process is the foundation of understanding how writing happens. Next, the focus on process culminates in a variety of approaches to essay structure. Finally, the text closes with a discussion on best practices in research. As such, the organization of the text outlines the typical structure of a semester of freshman composition.

I read the PDF version of the text and did not encounter any issues with the interface. The text is viewable, graphics are positioned well, and images are appropriately placed.

There are no glaring issues with the grammatical structures in the text.

Cultural Relevance rating: 2

The cultural relevance of the text might be critiqued, especially as the field of writing studies continues to grapple with issues of diversity and cultural competence. The text rightfully claims that “one language is (not) better than another.” However, the section on “Intellectual Standards of Quality” seems to contradict this claim. The uncritical depiction of “academic English” as “clear for everyone” actually leads the reader to infer that one language variety is more communicative than another. Still, the focus on Hawai'ian culture is novel and important.

To date, this is the most comprehensive and well organized current-traditional writing text I have seen in open access publication.

Reviewed by Rochella Bickford, Associate Professor, Kansas City Kansas Community College on 4/25/21

While the book provides a simple overview of a first-year composition course, there are many elements that would need to be included if it were to be used in courses that need to address different modes and genres of text. There are limited... read more

While the book provides a simple overview of a first-year composition course, there are many elements that would need to be included if it were to be used in courses that need to address different modes and genres of text. There are limited readings and assignments linked to the units, as well. Some of the assignments would require teaching additional skills or providing exemplars. For example, in 1.2 on College Success Skills, a student who was new to the concept of close reading and annotation would do better with a video and visual example of what it means to think through and annotate a text. There were no scoring guides, and linked rubrics would have been helpful to both students and instructors. There is no index or glossary.

There are more types of writing taught in first-year composition courses than what the textbook covers. For example, the text covers narration, process analysis, evaluation, and persuasion. However, students may need instruction in other types of writing, such as descriptive, expository, or argumentative essays. It wasn’t clear why section 4.2 listed several types of writing and noted that most of those types would not be covered. More importantly, teaching students to write objective summaries of text is an essential skill missing from this course. The section on writing a thesis statement (3.2) was not quite accurate in the limited description of where a thesis statement could be located in a text.

In recent years, the ideas of how grit, determination, and having a “growth mindset” have been largely criticized for discounting the real obstacles that many underprivileged students face. This text heavily emphasizes the growth mindset, so any updates to new research or evidence-based practices with this approach would need to be added. Some of the student “stories” may need to be updated to reflect recent and relevant views and contexts.

Most of the text uses clear and simple prose that is widely accessible to students. With instances where students are learning new words and concepts (such as annotation), exemplars or a glossary would be helpful.

Each of the sections begins with the same pattern: photograph, learning objectives, and a “Student’s Story.” Students will readily recognize the start of each unit. However, some sections contained activities and further resources, but some sections omitted these parts.

I reviewed the online version of the book. While the interface is very easy to navigate, it is almost too simple. There is no way to navigate within a page/section once you are on it. The pages of text are very long. I am looking for materials to use in an integrated, reading and writing course that pairs with a first-year composition class. I don’t think many students will take the time to read the entire page. If an instructor wanted to assign a section of the page, there isn’t a way to direct the students to a specific point.

The section on citing sources (5.3) could have been clearer in regard to MLA and APA format. This section mentioned citation management before it discussed what citations were or how to use them. It would have been nice to see links to the APA and MLA at the start of this section, as opposed to the very end. It was nice that the text linked to sources such as the OWL at Purdue University. Overall, the organization of the book was clear. Since this is a subject that is recursive as opposed to linear, it would work with any course structure or outline.

Due to the large “blocks” of text on many pages, additional, embedded graphics or videos would have helped to support the text. The inability to click on direct links to move to different areas of a page makes the reader scroll through the whole section before finding relevant information.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

There are a few grammatical errors in a few places. There are some awkward sentences and fragments. For example, in Citing Sources (5.3), “Using notes and bibliography is preferred” has a subject/verb agreement error. At the end of that section, one of the assignments asks students to “Put away a plagiarized essay and tell the instructor or peer mentor what you wrote.” It was very difficult to understand what the assignment is asking the student to do.

There do not seem to be any culturally offensive or insensitive references in the text. While the text mostly focuses on Hawaii, there are texts and videos that reference other races and cultures.

This is a simple and clear outline for a first-year composition text. It would be a great resource for students who are learning online, as long as the instructor can be very specific about the sections the students need to review. Instructors can expect to add several additional resources and exemplars to strengthen the content.

Reviewed by Karin Rhodes, Instructor, Salem State University on 7/2/20

This concise textbook is a good overview for newcomers to college. I like the first chapter on Success Skills; regardless of orientation workshops and First-Year Experience courses, freshmen need these skills to be repeated and reinforced. Our... read more

This concise textbook is a good overview for newcomers to college. I like the first chapter on Success Skills; regardless of orientation workshops and First-Year Experience courses, freshmen need these skills to be repeated and reinforced. Our institution's writing program is now emphasizing "genre" and "multimodal," neither of which are addressed here. I also would have liked some more help with "peer-reviewing" in the Revision chapter. There is no Index nor Glossary, and it is sometimes difficult to track down specific information. (The online version's search was useless, but the pdf and the ebook were more searchable.)

As far as I could tell, all the information was "accurate," but I cannot say it was error-free. (see Grammatical Errors and Clarity)

The book's audience is specifically Hawaiian, but that only makes it more interesting to read. I found it ironic that in the "Close Reading" section, the students are instructed to use colored pens/highlighters and to use "the front of the book" for notes. This is irrelevant if we don't have a print textbook. Information about how to do this with ebooks would be more relevant, wouldn't it?

The text is USUALLY clear and quite readable, but there are still some rough spots that weren't worked out in the editing. For instance, in the Revision chapter, in Table 1, the term "subordinate clause" is not defined and the example given seems to be a mistake. (Also, Table 1 claims to be about Punctuation and Mechanics, but it is about grammar or style. I mean, the rule that "using 'so' to mean 'really' or 'very' without using 'that' is an error" is NOT a punctuation rule.) Throughout, words are defined in-text, but could just as well be hot-linked. As I said above, "subordinate clause" is not explained, yet frequently the authors use a construction such as "English is a polyglot language (made up of multiple languages)."

SOME in-text citations were hot-linked, but not all. There would be a Works Cited in the middle of one chapter but not the next; why not just leave it to the end of each chapter? In Chapter 4, the hot-links were erratic.

In general, this trait is good. However, a more thorough numbering of the subsections would be so much more helpful. For example, 4.2 could have been further labeled 4.2.1, 4.2.2, and 4.2.3. If the students are using the pdf, page numbers can be referred to, but if they are using the ebook, will they understand "Look at the table at 41%"? How am I supposed to direct them to certain Activities boxes? If most of (at least) one of the chapters is pretty much from Writing for Success, why shouldn't I just use THAT source?

The main outline is organized as I would do it myself--quite standard. Style hints are interjected into the other chapters as the concepts arise, which is fine if the book as a whole will be used but creates a problem in the "modularity" trait. The format of starting with Learning Objectives and A Student's Story was nice, but consistency in adding Works Cited, Sources, and Further Sources would be nice.

Interface rating: 2

Some links do nor open correctly or misdirect. ADA compatibility is weak; the ebook has a lovely built-in reader, but the images do not have descriptions. I especially LIKED this text because of the variety of formats: online (ho-hum), pdf (too much wasted space; vertical format not so great on a laptop), ebook (my favorite; easy to read in a horizontal format). I was unable to test it out on a smartphone, which is how most of my students would probably access it.

Grammatical Errors rating: 3

In the section explaining the importance of punctuation such as commas, they left out the end-stop period! (I suppose this could be used as a teaching moment, but, really...) The font size went fluky in a couple of spots (got larger for no apparent reason). In at least two spots, I found problems with quotations. One was a quote that was opened and cited, but never closed. The other was at the beginning of the first chapter (some introduction!) The Student's Story was actually quoted from Michelle Obama's speech, but there were no quotation marks and no introductory remarks to indicate to the student-reader that the passage was anything other than the authors' words. Very confusing.

All the examples are Hawaiian. I don't think this would offend any students or make them feel "left out." The intended audience appears to be first-generation college students (which is my main demographic). There is no special sections or hints for ESL students, but the discussions of "code-switching" and Pidgin language is really interesting and enlightening for any student.

I am looking for "one-stop-shopping" in a textbook. This one covers the basics, is quite readable at the freshman level, has activities, gives examples (though not full student papers), and comes in various formats. Unfortunately, the book could use one more diligent edit. More links could be useful (for definitions, for further sources, maybe some exercises).

Reviewed by Padma Sundar, Adjunct Faculty, Bunker Hill Community College on 6/23/20

It covers all the areas a faculty would look for that can serve as a bridge course between high school and college. The topics range from functionalities of language to dynamics of it. The travel from the writing process to types of writing and... read more

It covers all the areas a faculty would look for that can serve as a bridge course between high school and college. The topics range from functionalities of language to dynamics of it. The travel from the writing process to types of writing and ending in research skills complete the cycle of learning required for students to embark on in-depth writing required as they go along in their 4-year college course. The examples provided at the end of each topic reinforces the concept. However, as a faculty, I would have looked for some more exercises with answers for practice. The authors can consider the idea of having a practice book with answers and sample essays as an addendum.

The language used is error-free and accurate.

The topics and activities chosen are relevant in terms of topic and timing. For example, the inclusion of thesis statements, strong and weak thesis statements just before essay writing gives students a definite approach to write an essay. The technique involved in writing a strong thesis statement makes the task of writing an essay easier. The definite transition from a narrative is very commendable as it allows students to embark on a journey of simple to complex. The students start from the art of narrating a story to convincing the audience in what they believe strongly with evidence. All these activities are relevant to what happens in their day-to-day life so their involvement and immersion are complete.

The language used is simple and the students from different backgrounds(ESL) can easily understand the concept. They may find some terms like citation, evaluation, and analysis challenging initially, however, as the course progresses they learn these and get familiar with. Afterall the aim of doing a course is to dwell into something new.

There is definitely a regular progression from simple to complex in the text and the end of the topic exercises cater to reinforcement. The text offers a lot of clarity to students on the topics covered and dwelled in detail to help them understand the concepts needed for effective writing.

The text has been very clearly organized into modules easily accessed according to topics.

There is a definite structure to the text with topics ranging from mechanics of writing to applying them in different forms of writing. The inclusion of student stories in between is a novel concept. The stories make students feel that the fears they have are normal and experienced by many likewise. The structure of the book helps the faculty to structure the syllabus on the lines of the book. The progression from simple to complex and concluding with researching skills leaves students well prepared for their next journey.

The book offers a good navigation process. The graphic organizer for the persuasion chart (pg. 22) could have been on a separate page that way the students can photocopy it and use it for their essays.

The text is strong in language with least or no errors in grammar.

The text can be well understood by students. The fact that the stories do not mention the background of the students is commendable. That way they can relate to students from different backgrounds. The emphasis on place-based and culture-based readings is direct evidence of an inclusive approach of the authors.

The book serves as a good source for faculty in devising their syllabus for College Writing 1. It has all the right things in place and gives a sense of direction to all those who are guessing as to what their starting point should be. The activities are well-graded and there is a logical and holistic approach to the course. I recommend this to all my colleagues who are new to teaching College Writing.

Reviewed by Stephanie Viens, Adjunct Faculty, Bristol Community College on 6/22/20

The text appropriately covers all subjects relevant to an entry-level writing course. As an adjunct faculty members teaching Communication and secondary English Language Arts teacher, I find this text wanting for naught in terms of topics covered.... read more

The text appropriately covers all subjects relevant to an entry-level writing course. As an adjunct faculty members teaching Communication and secondary English Language Arts teacher, I find this text wanting for naught in terms of topics covered. The content on introductions and conclusions could be slightly stronger by including full example introduction and conclusion paragraphs. The section on Rhetoric likewise has a bit of room for improvement, as it seems to suggest that "rhetoric" is a term students should be familiar with, but the relevancy beyond could be explained more explicitly. Some examples of how students might see/hear this term used in various courses would be helpful. Additionally, while most technical terms are explained throughout the chapter sections, there is not a glossary or index for quick reference. The content on citations could be a bit more clear by providing a few more examples of in-text citations; one explanation suggests that "when using a signal phrase" the in-text citation may differ, and the term "signal phrase" is unclear (a clearer example could be offered).

Content is accurate, error-free, and unbiased.

The "student story" examples provided are current and relevant to today's students. The organization of these short segments is such that they could be easily updated to reflect online learning environments that students might be experiencing or other changes to the overall student experience. The academic content is up-to-date and will remain current for many years to come, as the writing rules and processes covered are not apt to change in the near future.

The text is written in a clear fashion that is accessible to 100-level college readers. Technical terms are explained appropriately and thoroughly.

While the topics covered are all connected by way of the central goal of the text, there are a few minor "disconnects." For instance, the beginning of the text covers intellectual standards for quality, including but not limited to "clarity." The section on clarity explains and provides examples of misplaced and dangling modifiers and their impact on clarity. This content is important, and I feel it would be worth including again in the section on Editing, as students should seek out unclear modifiers during the Editing process.

This text is easily and readily divisible into smaller sections that can be assigned as needed, in varying order. The layout is clear and well-spaced such that pages or chapters could be disseminated to students as reference material or "worksheets" on particular topics, particularly the content on citations.

The chapter topics and sub-topics are well chosen and organized. The few number of chapters makes it easy to recall where one is in the text while reading. The sections are clear and the subsections are well-organized.

The text's interface is easy to understand and navigate with no issues in display or distortion of images, figures, etc.

The text is grammatically sound. There is one run-on sentence which may lead to some confusion in the section on "Researching" segment of the Prewriting section (#1 of the two often misunderstood aspects of researching).

The "Student's Story" section of each chapter adds to the inclusivity of the text. The content appears to be relatable to most students of various backgrounds.

I would feel confident using this text in an entry-level college writing course. I was pleased to find that much of the content on structuring and organizing writing aligns with popular and widespread knowledge of speech structure. I teach Public Speaking classes and always appreciate clear overlap between teaching writing and teaching speaking!

Reviewed by Marie Pabst, Adjunct Instructor, Bunker Hill Community College on 6/11/20

This book provides a very comprehensive description of all the parts of the writing process. Additionally, when discussing each stage of writing this book gives clear and effective strategies that writers (especially emerging undergraduate... read more

This book provides a very comprehensive description of all the parts of the writing process. Additionally, when discussing each stage of writing this book gives clear and effective strategies that writers (especially emerging undergraduate writers) can use to really engage effectively in the writing process. This book provides many small examples that students could use (such as the examples of sentence revision in the revising and editing chapters, or links to examples of argument writing) but does not directly provide full writing models for students. In addition to providing this comprehensive description of the writing process, this book breaks down a basic essay structure with sections on “Opening Paragraphs,” “Body Paragraphs” and “Conclusions.” All three of these sections discuss and dissect thesis statements. While I appreciated the concrete and clear nature of these chapters, I did find the description of this essay structure to be a bit too close to a “five-paragraph-essay,” which is something many of us teaching composition classes are trying to move beyond. In the Types of Essays chapter, this book describes Narration, Process Analysis, Evaluation, and Persuasion. Once again, in each of these sections, the authors give clear and sound advice and examples to help students engaged in this type of writing. While I would have liked to see more discussion about what unifies these essay types, I do think these four essay types cover most, if not all, writing that students will engage in during their undergraduate years.

The descriptions of the writing process and the types of essays in this book is very accurate and clear. My one concern is the chapter on Essay Structure, and the way that this chapter seems to suggest limitations on a thesis statement that is not always true for more complex writing, and the simplicity of describing an essay using the modality of the five-paragraph essay (in description, not necessarily in name). However, the information and examples in this chapter are accurate descriptions for what would be expected in this highly-structured essay writing, and many of the ideas and examples that are shared in the Essay Structure chapter could also be applied to more complex writing as well even if taken out of the “Opening paragraph, Body paragraph, Conclusion” structure.

This book is up to date, relevant right now, and will remain relevant since it covers aspects of undergraduate writing and undergraduate learning that are quite standard.

This book is extremely clear and easy to follow! Aspects of this book I found most helpful (for myself and my students) were: the learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter, the clear and concrete examples provided throughout the book, and the effectiveness of the book's organization. This book is very accessible for any undergraduate, and I believe it would be a very helpful book to use with all students, including non-native English speakers.

Terms in this book are used clearly and consistently throughout the whole text. This book reads as one well-thought-out text that was developed with a flow of learning in mind.

The chapters and sections of this book are organized in a way that allows any instructor to pull chapters or sections to suit their needs. One could easily use a single chapter or single section from a chapter to supplement another course text, or take chapters or sections from this text and compile them from essay examples, etc. to create a cohesive text for an introductory undergraduate writing course.

The organization of the book flows clearly from discussing the writing process, the structure of an essay, and essay types. Each chapter is made up of sections that flow logically from one to the other, but that could each be used as a stand-alone resource or students as well.

I read this text both as a .pdf and as an online text. Both were very easy to navigate. The online version had the additional benefit of making it easy to use hyperlinks in the table of contents to move around from chapter to chapter, section to section.

The grammar and conventions use is excellent.

The authors clearly used real student examples from their diverse university setting in this book. The student examples and images in the text are representative and inclusive. Additionally, in the appendix, there is a discussion and list of resources to help instructors think about place-based and culture-based readings.

Overall, as an instructor of undergraduate composition, I found this book to be an extremely helpful resource that will be highly accessible and helpful for my students.

Reviewed by Nina Presuto, Adjunct Professor, Raritan Valley Community College on 4/7/20

The text offers a clear scope and sequence of the writing process. Topics covered include prewriting, brainstorming, drafting, and revising/editing. Each of these steps, building upon previous step(s), creates a strong foundation for its topic,... read more

The text offers a clear scope and sequence of the writing process. Topics covered include prewriting, brainstorming, drafting, and revising/editing. Each of these steps, building upon previous step(s), creates a strong foundation for its topic, and leads to the next step and mastery of the basic writing process. It provides concise definitions for each term, explanation of process, and activity to apply skill. Resources augment instruction to delineate, support, and reteach information as needed.

The text is accurate and unbiased. The content begins by explaining writers'/readers' purpose and continues with visuals and outlines to illustrate writing techniques and structures. This teaches the student reason for writing and creates templates and checklists for students to follow and replicate in their work. It effectively teaches the basics of writing an essay without bias.

The text is relevant. The basic structure of writing is presented in a clear and organized manner that can easily be revised should the user wish to augment the text. Additionally, resources and or graphic organizers can be inserted between clearly delineated sections if desired. However, the content is up-to-date, is the basis for good writing across time, and clearly teaches the writing process.

The language contained in the text's content is easily digestible for all student levels. Vocabulary include expected instructional terms such as brainstorming, freewriting, and chronological order with clear context clues to help low level learners understand them and their applications. Moreover, the text discusses "appropriate language" as it pertains to the differing perspectives of communities and therefore classrooms within those communities. Not only is the language this text utilizes appropriate and effective for the students it serves, but the text directly addresses the issue of language in academia.

Each topic is clearly presented. The textbook's structure is clear and accessible. The table of contents is clearly located on the left hand of each page and links to all areas of the text for ease of navigation. Students can easily advance from topic to topic to review content for clarity as needed. The text directly links to resources to aid in instruction as needed.

The text's writing style is succinct and compact. Material is broken down into major headings: College Success Skills, The Writing Process, Essay Structure, Types of Essays, Research Skills. Each chapter is prefaced by an introduction that outlines objectives and illustrates a student example and perspective to connect with, inspire, and engage the learner. Broken down into sections based upon its topic, each chapter can be addressed as a whole or by focusing on one specific element. Links direct students to resources to support structure as needed. Each lesson is followed by activities for students to apply the skills learned.

Presented clearly and logically, the text begins by introducing students to the rigors of academic performance and provides guidelines for how to be successful. Next, the text systematically approaches the writing process and builds upon its application. After presenting a foundation for how to write an essay, the text delineates the elements of an essay. The remaining chapters elaborate on essay types and provide an appendix of resources.

The text is free of navigation errors and students can easily move from one chapter/topic to another. The presentation of information is prefaced by large headings and medium sized subheadings above the text’s content. These features organize text and draw reader's attention to content. All content is presented in uniform size and is easily interpreted by the student. Links connected to chapters open consistently and accurately present information related to topic. The margins are free of distractions and resources and sequentially linked within text where the augment instruction.

Text is free of grammatical errors. Text uses a variety of sentence and paragraph structures. Items listed are appropriately indented and bulleted as needed.

Content is culturally sensitive and inoffensive in every way. However, some student essays and resources thematically focus on the Hawaiian culture of the authoring university rather than of a cross section of universities in general. These references may not be particularly meaningful to other university’s’ usage and may require additional and more culturally relevant resources be acquired.

While this text is an excellent resource for teaching basic essay writing structure to average and low-level learners, it is not useful for students who arrives in class already espousing a knowledge the collegiate writing structure. The content does not extend beyond the basic essay writing structure, and therefore, the information, while concise, does not engage higher-level learners. Second, the scope of content is narrow. It provides the basic argument essay structure, but does not delve into variations on the structure. It provides a list and definition of ten specific “typical modes of essays” from cause and effect through process analysis essays, but it focuses only on four specific models: narrative, evaluative, process analysis, and persuasive rhetorical. However, the models are presented summarily rather than with the in depth style needed for mastery of the subtle differences between the models. Furthermore, the research essay is not covered at all. On the while, this text is an excellent resource for teaching low to emerging level writers but requires additional resources to reach higher-level learners.

Reviewed by Frank Napolitano, Associate Professor of English, Radford University on 1/22/20

This book provides an overview of some of the main topics in writing instruction. I found the section on "Peer and Instructor Feedback" to be particularly useful (33). The activities provided at the end of each section enable students and... read more

This book provides an overview of some of the main topics in writing instruction. I found the section on "Peer and Instructor Feedback" to be particularly useful (33). The activities provided at the end of each section enable students and instructors to work together on manageable writing goals during class. Other sections, like "The Revision Process," (32), "Language Usage" (34), "Engaging the Reader" (36-37), and "Identify the Characteristics of Good Primary Support" (49) were less developed and would have benefited from a more extended discussion and examples from student writing. The list of punctuation and mechanical mistakes (38-39) isn't comprehensive and may reflect the types of errors that the authors see in their particular students. The book does, however, provide several helpful links to outside resources, like the Purdue Owl and citation management applications.

I like that the brief section on grammar acknowledges that students know many of the "rules" of grammar and usage not because they learned them from a book, but because of their lived experiences (34). Other claims don't seem to reflect the complexity of writing in its many forms, though. For example, the text says that "A paragraph is a collection of sentences related to a main point" (44), when many successful examples of writing contain paragraphs with more than one "main" idea. Also, sentences like "An introduction exists as the first paragraph in a 5-page essay" seems limiting, since many successful 5-page papers have more than one introductory paragraph. Finally, the following admonitions seem idiosyncratic: "That being said, college-level statements would do well to not include the word "should," as a means of trying to sound authoritative so as to make a solid argument" (47); "Remember, do not refer to your essay in your essay. By the time one enters college, such strategies for writing thesis statements have passed" (48). Countless essays in academic journals employ meta-commentary, so it seems odd that students should be warned against doing so.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 3

I really like the book's stance that argument is a "truth-seeking" endeavor (71). Given the horrible state of public discourse in the U.S., this focus on working toward the truth is much appreciated. The book's advice on avoiding plagiarism is also very helpful (78-79). In other areas, the book offers rather traditional guidance that doesn't reflect recent conversations about academic writing. For example, the "Persuasion Map," without proper guidance, could encourage students to produce formulaic 5-paragraph essays that don't really look like real academic writing. I would like to see more information about how college writing is an effort to contribute to an ongoing scholarly conversation. I also would have liked to see more information about how the modes of discourse covered in chapter 4 (60-61) are less reflective of discrete types of essays but rather rhetorical moves that authors can shift among in a single piece of writing. The book hints as much in one of its activities, where it encourages students to "identify the modes of writing found in the [sample] essay" (62).

For the most part, the book did an excellent job of conveying complex topics in accessible language. There were moments when the book would have benefited from more focused editing. E.g.: "Stating in the middle of a story with the conclusion of the story existing as the first sentence in the conclusion paragraph" (45).

There are minor errors in consistency. For example, in its section on conclusions, the text advises students: "If the writer started with statistics, offer more statistics" (54). However, on the next page, it warns students against "introducing new material" (55).

The authors did a good job creating a modular text. I hope to see them develop several of the sections in the future.

For the most part, the book was organized well, with separate chapters focusing on the writing process, types of essays, etc. Some organizational choices seemed questionable, though. for example, I can see why the section on "sentence clarity" would fit into section 1.3: the Intellectual Standards for Quality, but I think it would have worked better in the section dedicated to editing and proofreading (34-35). The book could integrate the Intellectual Standards for Quality into each of its chapters, since doing so would show readers how the standards inform everything the book discusses.

The book's interface was very good. One way to improve it would be to offer hyperlinked references from one section to another.

I noticed a few grammatical errors throughout the piece, and they were a bit distracting. * "she found that her vocabulary were embarrassingly limited" (24). * "Discussing the dangers of illegal drug use is with elementary and middle school students is one method that schools use to help dissuade young people from abusing drugs as they grow up" (47).

I think the book does a nice job of referring to the culture and vernacular of the Hawaiian people. Appendix 1: Place-Based and Culture-Based Readings does a nice job in this regard. I can see other institutions adapting this format to benefit their own student populations. I also like how a couple of the book's "student stories" focused on non-traditional students.

The authors did an impressive job with this resource, given that they had only three days and nights to complete the "book sprint." In fact, many of my criticisms seem unfair given that I'm comparing the text to books that were developed over extended periods of time, with considerable editorial support. I would love to see the authors develop and revise the text based on the feedback they receive.

Reviewed by Allan Anderson, Lecturer, Hawaii Community Colleges on 1/4/20

A first semester composition course has to make certain specific foundational choices about its topic. Do you want to emphasize analysis and paragraph structure? Thesis-building? How much should be given to research and argument, and the citation... read more

A first semester composition course has to make certain specific foundational choices about its topic. Do you want to emphasize analysis and paragraph structure? Thesis-building? How much should be given to research and argument, and the citation process? This textbook hits all of these topics well, but would function best integrated with further exercises and assignments which implement specifics. It comes across as an excellent introduction/survey of how to master composition.

The text never strays from the facts in content areas. Claims regarding the efficacy and value of parts of the writing process are backed up with research references. Citation directions and examples are clear, useful, and easy to apply.

The content covered is not radical; it proceeds through useful and standard methods of composition which are unlikely to require seismic revision any time soon. Contemporary examples are interspersed with classic ones. The web links and appendixes are arranged such that any further updates look easy for the authors and editors to develop.

You notice how the topic and word choice reflect the authors' time in the university and community college classroom, refining how they express their points. Sometimes it feels brief, but never because it is skipping over essential pieces. It states it is targeted at 100-level students, but I feel it would also be effective with developmental students a level below that. My community college students in English 100 were all able to grasp the sections I assigned from this text; no problematic areas stood out.

The team of writers appear to have collaborated tightly, making sure that terminology defined early on in the text remains useful to students throughout the entire book's topics. Once in a while, some areas of the text seems more developed than others. Usually, though, it's steady in its focus. The sections are broken down into the same subheading format throughout. Minimal confusion should ensue.

I used sections of this book out of order, supporting my own existing unit plans. The text sections are very to-the-point and focused on the essential information at hand, which made them plug in well. Subheadings are used frequently. Even more detail and development under each subheading would improve re-usability. In general, though, I did not encounter any troubling tangles.

I appreciate that the topics covered do not dive directly into writing an essay, but rather build up carefully and step-by-step through the portions and process of writing. This is the sort of instruction which helps bring together a class which starts with widely different backgrounds. Some student populations may be ready to dive right into paper-writing, which allows for more time spent on learning and practicing research. But this text's organization and choice of topics makes it very useful for a more heterogeneous community college classroom.

As far the interface's clarity and lack of error, this text is fine. Everything is where it should be and works correctly. The interface and layout only suffers from being a little boring. It could be improved by further editing attention to include more charts and images which set the scene of the work being done. But the text as it is remains useful and functional, with no interface problems interfering with student use.

Next to no grammatical errors turned up during textbook use, and none which proved confusing to students.

This text's cultural sensitivity and range reflects its state of origin. The University of Hawaii educator authors range from indigenous to African-American texts as relevant and valuable examples. Some other sections seem more generic; perhaps a future revision might include similar attentions throughout.

This text does an admirable job of covering a lot of ground without excessive verbiage. It reads as every section being useful to students and applicable to the Composition classroom. I plan to use it, adapted as needed, in my upcoming classes.

Reviewed by Lee Babin, English Instructor, Fletcher Technical Community College on 12/13/19

The book is a beginning to hopefully providing more in-depth lessons and instructions. Lessons touch upon different concepts of first-year college composition but rely on the person using the text to find almost all examples and supplemental... read more

The book is a beginning to hopefully providing more in-depth lessons and instructions. Lessons touch upon different concepts of first-year college composition but rely on the person using the text to find almost all examples and supplemental materials for further understanding of the concepts. There is a hyperlinked table of contents of the text, but no index nor glossary for the text. Chapters within the text are quite short, sometimes only covering one page in pdf format. Many of the chapters feel disjointed, not quite building on concepts of the previous chapter. In other words, the chapters feel like they are independent lessons rather than concepts building on previous information obtained. Chapter 4 introduces ten rhetorical modes of writing but only includes detailed instruction on four of them. There are no full internal writing examples in a composition text for students to get a sense of completion of essay composition.

Overall, the text has few noticeable errors. There are some formatting choices for headers and subheaders that lead to some confusion in the online text, but those same formatting choices seem clear within a printed (pdf) version of the text. References to "Sources" or "Works Cited" should be centered in the text to follow normal expectations of students producing papers. On P. 38 (pdf file), the first example references punctuation rules of compound sentences but uses a complex sentence as its only example; compound and complex sentences should be distinguished as different sentence types. Chapter 4 introduces different rhetorical modes of writing, but it presents only four of those modes in detailed instruction and includes them out of order from the introductory text. Also, the chapter introduction claims that there are "links to real student essays." However, 4.2 Narration provides no such link, and 4.3 Process Analysis and 4.4 Evaluation link to a journal with no obvious examples of process analysis nor evaluation. On P. 17 (pdf file), in the "Fairness" section, the font size changes in the middle of a sentence, beginning with the bullet point "Are there any fallacies..." and on P. 81, the first full paragraph does the same. On P. 45 (pdf file), "5-page essay" should be "five-paragraph"? The second bullet point on that page has an unnecessary comma in "attitude, toward" and there is a misspelled "Stating" instead of "Starting."

Overall, this section looks like it is doing what is expected. External links look like they can be easily replaced by current examples. Choices in MLA citation can be updated to the latest trends of the MLA style. Examples for the "A Student's Story" sections could easily be updated to modern/current problems when necessary. Appendix 2 gives a list of online content contained in the text, so that section can be updated as needed.

The text seems to do a decent job of being clear throughout on the terms used. There are several introductions to Latin and Greek phrases used in logic and rhetorical concepts with a definition of those words. A glossary and index could be helpful for further reference.

Terminology throughout the text remains consistent. Terms that are defined early in the text are used throughout. That is why the glossary may be necessary. Some terms are defined again, like ethos, logos, and pathos in 4.5 Persuasion.

Because the text is short overall, it does divide sections into smaller sections. In some cases, the sections are too small, with headers and subsequent spacing on the page dominating over actual instructional text. More specific examples could and should be included for each of those sections to give each header more information than what is on the page. For example, in 4.4 Evaluation, the four points of structure are spread out, but only the "Evidence" section has any further explanation. This section either needs bullet points with the definitions or full explanations with examples to give depth to the section.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 2

While the chapters are justifiably ordered by the book authors' preferences, there is little transition from one chapter to another and from one section of a chapter to another. Composition is a type of subject based entirely on adding more information building on previously addressed concepts and practices. While those concepts and practices are indicated, the authors do not explicitly make those connections from one chapter or section of a chapter to another. This may be a space or content decision, but understanding how each of the steps in the writing process connects with the structure of essays and the types of essays could help in giving students a more comprehensive understanding of English composition courses.

Pictures and graphics are minimal. The only effective graphic throughout is the 2.2 Prewriting graphic for making a Persuasion Map. However, that particular map seems to be out of place for the purpose of the book. Alike or similar graphs for other essay types would prove useful here.

All suggestions come from the paginated PDF version of the textbook. On P. 24 of the pdf, 2.1 Introduction, "vocabulary were" should be "vocabulary was." On P. 28, "According to the" is missing what the noun is. On P. 38, the first section gives a complex sentence example for a compound sentence rule: "Unless the surf is bad, we are going to surf in the morning." That should be an example like this: "The surf is bad this morning, but we are still going to surf." On P. 38, under "Absolutes," it states, "Avoid them in most all cases." The term "most all" is a colloquialism and is not proper for a textbook. On P. 45, "5-page" appears to mean "five-paragraph." On P. 45, remove the unnecessary comma in "attitude, toward." On P. 45, "Stating" should be "Starting." On P. 78, it should read, "Students' Stories" perhaps, but definitely not "A Students' Story" as it currently does. On P. 85, one of the citation examples is missing the opening quotation marks.

The text is not specifically geared towards a particular region, but the authors are all a part of the Hawaii university system. Therefore, some of the materials and examples given are based on their particular knowledge of the region. There are no noticeable insensitive or offensive materials throughout the text, and none of the examples of "A Student's Story" seem to indicate the student's race, ethnicity, nor background.

For being a three-day project as indicated in the Foreword, this is an impressive compilation. There is definitely potential in the future of the text with my main recommendations being to make the different chapters and subchapters of the book relate to previous chapters (including internal hyperlinks and an index and glossary section) AND adding more in-text examples for students to have an easier time comprehending and processing the information presented.

Reviewed by Denise Acevedo, Assistant Professor, Michigan State University on 11/13/19

Chapter 1 is odd as it does not use the Sections 2 or 3 as modes to introduce a learning narrative, for example; instead, the information consists of details that students should have received in their New Student Orientation program or a New... read more

Chapter 1 is odd as it does not use the Sections 2 or 3 as modes to introduce a learning narrative, for example; instead, the information consists of details that students should have received in their New Student Orientation program or a New Student Experience course. I recommend Chapters 3 & 4 be switched so students are introduced first to the diverse types of essay types; e.g. argumentative, expository, narrative, et al. as Chapter 3's Introduction, explanations and examples are solely from the argumentative perspective, which may make it more difficult for students to try other types of writing, especially first-year students as this point-to-point style is ingrained during their K-12 academic writing career.

In Chapter 5.1, the authors include an example of Jaden’s lack of commitment to research, and note that in his conversation with his teacher, he points out that he included both in-text citation and a Works Cited page. Although his formatting for both requirements were not perfect, he did, in fact, include some details on his external resources, so the authors might want to revise their wording of “Such plagiarism…” as Jaden did not, technically, plagiarize; instead, he was just not accurate in his citation details, which is different. Jaden may be lazy, but in the authors' example, he did not commit plagiarism.

The authors could have included real-life examples of varied Island languages, for example, via prior students' essays for more consistent learning and academic/workplace application.

Chapter 1 can be revised so that the voice is of a peer rather than someone talking to/at the student; e.g. "College students are expected to demonstrate independence, responsibility, and relationship-building skills" could become "As a college student, you will be expected to demonstrate independence, responsibility, and relationship-building skills" to make the advice and subsequent activities and assignments more relatable, and thus applicable, to first-year and non-traditional learners.

Consistency rating: 3

Yes, but some terms are more discipline-based; e.g. from an educator's professional vocabulary rather than a student's. When revised, consider the terminology from the students' perspectives, those who are first-year and non-traditional, and know, too, that in Hawaii there are numerous cultures and languages to be considered (and yes, I know the authors know this!), so perhaps include examples using the diversity of the Island. My recommendation here is somewhat developed in Chapter 3.1, "A Student's Story."

Chapter 1, in particular, has too much text; first-year and non-traditional students' interest and focus may increase if (1) graphics are incorporated and/or (2) real-life scenario examples are provided for students to practice during class as this will also allow relationship-building and trust to grow between students and students/educator. Chapter 2.2 could further develop and include examples of varied paragraph formatting styles; the style that is included suggests a Point-to-Point essay, but it is not as the last paragraph does not fit that P2P style. Chapter 3.2, though, only offers instructions from that 5-pararagph model, which is not always a realistic writing practice in the real world. A thesis statement does not always have to be arguable; a thesis statement, depending on the form of writing, can be opinion-based and this more creative in its narrative, which, also, is not always i the 5-paragraph structure. Chapter 4.2's Activities section is not correctly formatted, which may make it more difficult for students with accessibility barriers to read/decipher. If the authors include ten types of essays (Chapter 4.1), then they should include explanations et al. for all ten and not just four (4.2. 4.3, 4.4, & 4.5). Connect each Chapter to the "Clarifying Aristotelian Rhetorical Concepts" in Chapter 1.3 as rare references do not support cumulative learning and application practices. Chapter 5.2 should be moved to Chapter 2 as research is an integral part of the writing processes. The Citation Management in Chapter 5.3 offers three online citation support options; I recommend the authors either (1) use the OWL at Purdue only or (2) require students to purchase via OER a text that offers MLA formatting examples and exercises as EasyBib and BibMe do not use the most recent edition of MLA formatting guidelines.

The Chapters arrangement lacks flow as students should be introduced to pre-flection, research and formatting guidelines in the beginning of their academic writing career rather than in the middle or end of the semester. Updates could be made yearly as past students' examples are incorporated into each Chapter as examples and/or peer-editing practice.

The graphics, charts et al. are high quality, but as a learner with an LD (not assessed and diagnosed until my doctoral program!), some students may find "unpacking" tables, charts, and/or graphs more difficulty, especially as they relate to writing (Persuasion Map, 2.2), so an in-class activity that is included in the book may help students comprehend the mapping idea from a new, applicable lens. Most students will not know what Meta-cognitive (Chapter 2.2.) means. Will this be addressed as it is not in the SLOs? 2.3 could be further developed to include examples for students to peer review and discuss in class before they start drafting. Provide examples of 2.4's ARRR. So glad the OWL at Purdue link is included as this resources is current on MLA formatting, offers applicable examples and is free to students and teachers. I like the inclusion of frequency adverbs in 2.5 as I find my first-year writing students reply heavily on these parts of speech to convey what they believe are profound realizations. Consider adding more in-text or connect to the OWL at Purdue and discourage the overuse of these terms as they are vague in their meaning.

In Chapter 2, Introduction, the term "vocabulary" is used as a plural when it is a non-count noun and must be connected with a singular verb; e.g. In middle school, she found that her vocabulary was (not were) embarrassingly limited. In "A Student's Story," the commas are not uses correctly as the set-off portion is not an appositive, so the second comma should be removed; i.e. As she entered college and enrolled in her first-year writing course, she was anxious about attending a required conference with her instructor who was meeting with each student to discuss the rough drafts of their first essays. In 2.2., this is unclear as it is missing punctuation and a noun or pronoun: "According to the Leilani was shocked..." For 2. under Activities in Chapter 2.2, there is a missing comma: "For each writing assignment in class, spend three (add comma here) 10-minute sessions either..." Also in Chapter 2.2, #2 should include a hyphen for the compound adjective; e.g. "Writers become so involved in the research process that they don’t start the actual writing process soon enough so as to meet a due date with a well-written, edited, and revised finished composition."

I don't find any culturally insensitive content, but I admire that this text is written for a certain demographic, which is why I recommend the authors include examples that students will relate to, such as prior students' essays written in pidgin, which they can revise (as a collaborative activity, with the teacher's help) into Standard Written English to see how code-switching works and can impact their academic and professional writing experiences. If the text will be used (mostly?) in first-year writing programs in Hawaii, then include more examples from students who represent these demographics via names in the opening stories and student examples.

The text should be an exemplar for students, especially as first-year learners tend to copy what is presented, which is why I recommend that MLA formatting be consistent; e.g. Works Cited in 1.2, 1.3, 2.2 et al. be centered, as per MLA formatting guidelines. Chapter 3.2 & 3.4's external resources are not correctly formatted as the title is Sources rather than Works Cited, with each external source listed as per MLA formatting guidelines.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1. College Success Skills
• Chapter 2. The Writing Process
• Chapter 3. Essay Structure
• Chapter 4. Types of Essays
• Chapter 5. Research Skills

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This OER textbook has been designed for students to learn the foundational concepts for English 100 (first-year college composition). The content aligns to learning outcomes across all campuses in the University of Hawai'i system. It was designed, written, and edited during a three day book sprint in May, 2019.

About the Contributors

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Readings on Writing

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing   is a book series containing peer-reviewed collections of essays—all composed by teachers for students—with each volume freely available for download under a Creative Commons license. Writing Spaces aims to build a library of quality open access textbooks for the writing classroom as an alternative to costly textbooks.

Each series collection contains engaging essays from different writing teachers in the field and explores important topics about writing in a manner and style accessible to both teachers and students. In each chapter, authors present their unique views, insights, and strategies for writing by addressing the undergraduate reader directly. Drawing on their own experiences, these teachers-as-writers invite students to join in the larger conversation about developing nearly every aspect of their craft. Consequently, each essay functions as a standalone text that will easily complement other selected readings in first-year writing or writing-intensive courses across the disciplines at any level. While the early volumes will focus on instructional texts for first-year composition, future editions may feature texts for writing in the disciplines and professional writing classrooms.

Because the essays are Creative Commons licensed, PDF electronic versions of each series edition and each individual essay can be downloaded from this website. Teachers can freely share these texts with other teachers or prepare printed course packs without need for copyright clearance. For those who would like professionally printed copies for their classes, printed versions of each series edition will be available for purchase through  Parlor Press .

Savings for Students

With your participation,  Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing  will provide an alternative to ever escalating textbook prices at a time when many students and their families face difficult economic circumstances. As the book series progresses, the  Writing Spaces  website will become a library of free to download essays on a wide range of topics for your students in first year composition, writing across the disciplines, and professional writing classes. 

After picking and choosing from the selection of essays, teachers will be able to link to the individual electronic texts or put together printed course packs without paying costly licensing fees. Printed versions of each book in the series will also be available for purchase through  Parlor Press . 

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The Writing Spaces project is not only a textbooks series. We are a community of individuals who see the value in open educational resources for writing education. Check out our masthead to meet some of the people involved, and send us an email to learn about opportunities to join the community.

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Teachers looking to adopt Writing Spaces ‘ curriculum for their class can browse individual volumes, or check out our Essay Clusters feature. Writing Spaces also offers an Activities and Assignments Archive .

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Nonfiction Books » Essays

The best essays: the 2021 pen/diamonstein-spielvogel award, recommended by adam gopnik.

WINNER OF the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

Every year, the judges of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay search out the best book of essays written in the past year and draw attention to the author's entire body of work. Here, Adam Gopnik , writer, journalist and PEN essay prize judge, emphasizes the role of the essay in bearing witness and explains why the five collections that reached the 2021 shortlist are, in their different ways, so important.

Interview by Benedict King

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick

Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé

Maybe the People Would be the Times by Luc Sante

1 Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich

2 unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader by vivian gornick, 3 nature matrix: new and selected essays by robert michael pyle, 4 terroir: love, out of place by natasha sajé, 5 maybe the people would be the times by luc sante.

W e’re talking about the books shortlisted for the 2021 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay . As an essayist yourself, or as a reader of essays, what are you looking for? What’s the key to a good essay ?

Let’s turn to the books that made the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Award for the Art of the Essay. The winning book was Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich , whose books have been recommended a number of times on Five Books. Tell me more. 

One of the criteria for this particular prize is that it should be not just for a single book, but for a body of work. One of the things we wanted to honour about Barbara Ehrenreich is that she has produced a remarkable body of work. Although it’s offered in a more specifically political register than some essayists, or that a great many past prize winners have practised, the quiddity of her work is that it remains rooted in personal experience, in the act of bearing witness. She has a passionate political point to make, certainly, a series of them, many seeming all the more relevant now than when she began writing. Nonetheless, her writing still always depends on the intimacy of first-hand knowledge, what people in post-incarceration work call ‘lived experience’ (a term with a distinguished philosophical history). Her book Nickel and Dimed is the classic example of that. She never writes from a distance about working-class life in America. She bears witness to the nature and real texture of working-class life in America.

“One point of giving awards…is to keep passing the small torches of literary tradition”

Next up of the books on the 2021 PEN essay prize shortlist is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader by Vivian Gornick.

Vivian Gornick is a writer who’s been around for a very long time. Although longevity is not in itself a criterion for excellence—or for this prize, or in the writing life generally—persistence and perseverance are. Writers who keep coming back at us, again and again, with a consistent vision, are surely to be saluted. For her admirers, her appetite to re-read things already read is one of the most attractive parts of her oeuvre , if I can call it that; her appetite not just to read but to read deeply and personally. One of the things that people who love her work love about it is that her readings are never academic, or touched by scholarly hobbyhorsing. They’re readings that involve the fullness of her experience, then applied to literature. Although she reads as a critic, she reads as an essayist reads, rather than as a reviewer reads. And I think that was one of the things that was there to honour in her body of work, as well.

Is she a novelist or journalist, as well?

Let’s move on to the next book which made the 2021 PEN essay shortlist. This is Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays by Robert Michael Pyle.

I have a special reason for liking this book in particular, and that is that it corresponds to one of the richest and oldest of American genres, now often overlooked, and that’s the naturalist essay. You can track it back to Henry David Thoreau , if not to Ralph Waldo Emerson , this American engagement with nature , the wilderness, not from a narrowly scientific point of view, nor from a purely ecological or environmental point of view—though those things are part of it—but again, from the point of view of lived experience, of personal testimony.

Let’s look at the next book on the shortlist of the 2021 PEN Awards, which is Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Why did these essays appeal?

One of the things that was appealing about this book is that’s it very much about, in every sense, the issues of the day: the idea of place, of where we are, how we are located on any map as individuals by ethnic identity, class, gender—all of those things. But rather than being carried forward in a narrowly argumentative way, again, in the classic manner of the essay, Sajé’s work is ruminative. It walks around these issues from the point of view of someone who’s an expatriate, someone who’s an émigré, someone who’s a world citizen, but who’s also concerned with the idea of ‘terroir’, the one place in the world where we belong. And I think the dialogue in her work between a kind of cosmopolitanism that she has along with her self-critical examination of the problem of localism and where we sit on the world, was inspiring to us.

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Last of the books on the shortlist for the 2021 Pen essay award is Maybe the People Would Be the Times by Luc Sante.

Again, here’s a writer who’s had a distinguished generalised career, writing about lots of places and about lots of subjects. In the past, he’s made his special preoccupation what he calls ‘low life’, but I think more broadly can be called the marginalized or the repressed and abject. He’s also written acute introductions to the literature of ‘low life’, the works of Asbury and David Maurer, for instance.

But I think one of the things that was appealing about what he’s done is the sheer range of his enterprise. He writes about countless subjects. He can write about A-sides and B-sides of popular records—singles—then go on to write about Jacques Rivette’s cinema. He writes from a kind of private inspection of public experience. He has a lovely piece about tabloid headlines and their evolution. And I think that omnivorous range of enthusiasms and passions is a stirring reminder in a time of specialization and compartmentalization of the essayist’s freedom to roam. If Pyle is in the tradition of Thoreau, I suspect Luc Sante would be proud to be put in the tradition of Baudelaire—the flaneur who walks the streets, sees everything, broods on it all and writes about it well.

One point of giving awards, with all their built-in absurdity and inevitable injustice, is to keep alive, or at least to keep passing, the small torches of literary tradition. And just as much as we’re honoring the great tradition of the naturalist essay in the one case, I think we’re honoring the tradition of the Baudelairean flaneur in this one.

April 18, 2021

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Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1986. His many books include A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism . He is a three time winner of the National Magazine Award for Essays & Criticism, and in 2021 was made a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur by the French Republic.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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In-Text Citations: The Basics

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

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Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

Note:  This page reflects the latest version of the APA Publication Manual (i.e., APA 7), which released in October 2019. The equivalent resource for the older APA 6 style  can be found here .

Reference citations in text are covered on pages 261-268 of the Publication Manual. What follows are some general guidelines for referring to the works of others in your essay.

Note:  On pages 117-118, the Publication Manual suggests that authors of research papers should use the past tense or present perfect tense for signal phrases that occur in the literature review and procedure descriptions (for example, Jones (1998)  found  or Jones (1998)  has found ...). Contexts other than traditionally-structured research writing may permit the simple present tense (for example, Jones (1998)  finds ).

APA Citation Basics

When using APA format, follow the author-date method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the year of publication for the source should appear in the text, like, for example, (Jones, 1998). One complete reference for each source should appear in the reference list at the end of the paper.

If you are referring to an idea from another work but  NOT  directly quoting the material, or making reference to an entire book, article or other work, you only have to make reference to the author and year of publication and not the page number in your in-text reference.

On the other hand, if you are directly quoting or borrowing from another work, you should include the page number at the end of the parenthetical citation. Use the abbreviation “p.” (for one page) or “pp.” (for multiple pages) before listing the page number(s). Use an en dash for page ranges. For example, you might write (Jones, 1998, p. 199) or (Jones, 1998, pp. 199–201). This information is reiterated below.

Regardless of how they are referenced, all sources that are cited in the text must appear in the reference list at the end of the paper.

In-text citation capitalization, quotes, and italics/underlining

• Always capitalize proper nouns, including author names and initials: D. Jones.
• If you refer to the title of a source within your paper, capitalize all words that are four letters long or greater within the title of a source:  Permanence and Change . Exceptions apply to short words that are verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs:  Writing New Media ,  There Is Nothing Left to Lose .

( Note:  in your References list, only the first word of a title will be capitalized:  Writing new media .)

• When capitalizing titles, capitalize both words in a hyphenated compound word:  Natural-Born Cyborgs .
• Capitalize the first word after a dash or colon: "Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock's  Vertigo ."
• If the title of the work is italicized in your reference list, italicize it and use title case capitalization in the text:  The Closing of the American Mind ;  The Wizard of Oz ;  Friends .
• If the title of the work is not italicized in your reference list, use double quotation marks and title case capitalization (even though the reference list uses sentence case): "Multimedia Narration: Constructing Possible Worlds;" "The One Where Chandler Can't Cry."

Short quotations

If you are directly quoting from a work, you will need to include the author, year of publication, and page number for the reference (preceded by "p." for a single page and “pp.” for a span of multiple pages, with the page numbers separated by an en dash).

You can introduce the quotation with a signal phrase that includes the author's last name followed by the date of publication in parentheses.

If you do not include the author’s name in the text of the sentence, place the author's last name, the year of publication, and the page number in parentheses after the quotation.

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Place direct quotations that are 40 words or longer in a free-standing block of typewritten lines and omit quotation marks. Start the quotation on a new line, indented 1/2 inch from the left margin, i.e., in the same place you would begin a new paragraph. Type the entire quotation on the new margin, and indent the first line of any subsequent paragraph within the quotation 1/2 inch from the new margin. Maintain double-spacing throughout, but do not add an extra blank line before or after it. The parenthetical citation should come after the closing punctuation mark.

Because block quotation formatting is difficult for us to replicate in the OWL's content management system, we have simply provided a screenshot of a generic example below.

Formatting example for block quotations in APA 7 style.

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Direct quotations from sources that do not contain pages should not reference a page number. Instead, you may reference another logical identifying element: a paragraph, a chapter number, a section number, a table number, or something else. Older works (like religious texts) can also incorporate special location identifiers like verse numbers. In short: pick a substitute for page numbers that makes sense for your source.

Summary or paraphrase

If you are paraphrasing an idea from another work, you only have to make reference to the author and year of publication in your in-text reference and may omit the page numbers. APA guidelines, however, do encourage including a page range for a summary or paraphrase when it will help the reader find the information in a longer work. 

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What I’ve Learned From My Students’ College Essays

The genre is often maligned for being formulaic and melodramatic, but it’s more important than you think.

By Nell Freudenberger

Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn’t supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they’re afraid that packaging the genuine trauma they’ve experienced is the only way to secure their future. The college counselor at the Brooklyn high school where I’m a writing tutor advises against trauma porn. “Keep it brief , ” she says, “and show how you rose above it.”

I started volunteering in New York City schools in my 20s, before I had kids of my own. At the time, I liked hanging out with teenagers, whom I sometimes had more interesting conversations with than I did my peers. Often I worked with students who spoke English as a second language or who used slang in their writing, and at first I was hung up on grammar. Should I correct any deviation from “standard English” to appeal to some Wizard of Oz behind the curtains of a college admissions office? Or should I encourage students to write the way they speak, in pursuit of an authentic voice, that most elusive of literary qualities?

In fact, I was missing the point. One of many lessons the students have taught me is to let the story dictate the voice of the essay. A few years ago, I worked with a boy who claimed to have nothing to write about. His life had been ordinary, he said; nothing had happened to him. I asked if he wanted to try writing about a family member, his favorite school subject, a summer job? He glanced at his phone, his posture and expression suggesting that he’d rather be anywhere but in front of a computer with me. “Hobbies?” I suggested, without much hope. He gave me a shy glance. “I like to box,” he said.

I’ve had this experience with reluctant writers again and again — when a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously. Of course the primary goal of a college essay is to help its author get an education that leads to a career. Changes in testing policies and financial aid have made applying to college more confusing than ever, but essays have remained basically the same. I would argue that they’re much more than an onerous task or rote exercise, and that unlike standardized tests they are infinitely variable and sometimes beautiful. College essays also provide an opportunity to learn precision, clarity and the process of working toward the truth through multiple revisions.

When a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously.

Even if writing doesn’t end up being fundamental to their future professions, students learn to choose language carefully and to be suspicious of the first words that come to mind. Especially now, as college students shoulder so much of the country’s ethical responsibility for war with their protest movement, essay writing teaches prospective students an increasingly urgent lesson: that choosing their own words over ready-made phrases is the only reliable way to ensure they’re thinking for themselves.

Teenagers are ideal writers for several reasons. They’re usually free of preconceptions about writing, and they tend not to use self-consciously ‘‘literary’’ language. They’re allergic to hypocrisy and are generally unfiltered: They overshare, ask personal questions and call you out for microaggressions as well as less egregious (but still mortifying) verbal errors, such as referring to weed as ‘‘pot.’’ Most important, they have yet to put down their best stories in a finished form.

I can imagine an essay taking a risk and distinguishing itself formally — a poem or a one-act play — but most kids use a more straightforward model: a hook followed by a narrative built around “small moments” that lead to a concluding lesson or aspiration for the future. I never get tired of working with students on these essays because each one is different, and the short, rigid form sometimes makes an emotional story even more powerful. Before I read Javier Zamora’s wrenching “Solito,” I worked with a student who had been transported by a coyote into the U.S. and was reunited with his mother in the parking lot of a big-box store. I don’t remember whether this essay focused on specific skills or coping mechanisms that he gained from his ordeal. I remember only the bliss of the parent-and-child reunion in that uninspiring setting. If I were making a case to an admissions officer, I would suggest that simply being able to convey that experience demonstrates the kind of resilience that any college should admire.

The essays that have stayed with me over the years don’t follow a pattern. There are some narratives on very predictable topics — living up to the expectations of immigrant parents, or suffering from depression in 2020 — that are moving because of the attention with which the student describes the experience. One girl determined to become an engineer while watching her father build furniture from scraps after work; a boy, grieving for his mother during lockdown, began taking pictures of the sky.

If, as Lorrie Moore said, “a short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage,” what is a college essay? Every once in a while I sit down next to a student and start reading, and I have to suppress my excitement, because there on the Google Doc in front of me is a real writer’s voice. One of the first students I ever worked with wrote about falling in love with another girl in dance class, the absolute magic of watching her move and the terror in the conflict between her feelings and the instruction of her religious middle school. She made me think that college essays are less like love than limerence: one-sided, obsessive, idiosyncratic but profound, the first draft of the most personal story their writers will ever tell.

Nell Freudenberger’s novel “The Limits” was published by Knopf last month. She volunteers through the PEN America Writers in the Schools program.

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Paul Scheer Is Most Nervous About Sharing This Part of His New Book (Exclusive)

The comedian and actor’s new essay collection, ‘Joyful Recollections of Trauma,’ is on sale May 21

Carly Tagen-Dye is the Books editorial assistant at PEOPLE, where she writes for both print and digital platforms.

Abby Stern is a writer-reporter at PEOPLE. She’s been writing about entertainment, fashion, beauty, and other lifestyle content for over fifteen years.

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Paul Scheer originally had some reservations about a chapter in his forthcoming book. Speaking with PEOPLE at a Los Angeles party for his new essay collection, Joyful Recollections of Trauma , on May 16, the comedian, 48, shared that there was a chapter that he was initially hesitant to include.  “The one chapter I struggled with the most was the ADHD chapter that's at the end because it was something that I got diagnosed with as an older person, as a person with a child,” he said. The Veep actor said that both his publisher and his wife, Grace and Frankie star June Diane Raphael , encouraged him to include the section in the essay collection, which details the ways his childhood experiences have impacted his life. 

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“She's like, ‘It's the first time I feel like I understood you, like I understood what having your issue is like,'" Scheer said of Raphael. "And it's been odd because it's the one thing that I've told really no one."

Despite how difficult it was for Scheer to write that part of the book, he recalled that early readers were impacted impacted by the chapter, and that they told him it spoke to them. “That was really hard for me, to be that vulnerable, because I think it's still fresh with me, whereas the other stuff was a little bit more dealt with on some level,” he said. “And then I realized that what I respond to in any kind of art, whether it's film, TV or books, is that personal thing, that journey. And it's like my book isn't prescriptive in any way, but it is personal.”

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“I felt like I realize now I like that chapter being in it because I'm like, ‘Oh, if I would've read that chapter, I might have checked myself out if someone else wrote it,’” he added. “And really, that's how I found out that I had ADHD, was [by] reading other people's dealing with it. So that was something that was really hard for me to be out there with, but also I'm now proud that it's there.”

Family also plays a prominent role in Scheer’s book, as the actor said that he dedicates the book to his parents, as well as his wife and their sons, Gus and Sam.

“They challenge me in the best ways and they bring me to a place that does make me better, that I want to be a great parent to them,” Scheer said of his kids. “I know I'm going to have faults. I know I'm going to make a mistake, but they make me want to be a person that is aware…they make me want to be better.”

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“I don't think I could have written this book without being a father because that perspective of being a father allowed me to look at my childhood differently, and I think has colored how I treat them and how I am with them,” he continued.

Scheer added that writing his book ultimately became a way to see how far he’s come in his life and career. “I think the reason why I was able to write this book now was because of the work I did,” he says. “I didn't treat the book [as] my therapy as much as a reflection of the work that I've done on myself, so I was able to feel comfortable.”

Never miss a story — sign up for  PEOPLE's free daily newsletter  to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from juicy celebrity news to compelling human-interest stories. Joyful Recollections of Trauma will hit shelves on May 21, and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.

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• Affiliation: Kenan-Flagler Business School
• In Chapter 1, I analyze the implications of managers’ early-life diversity experiences for workforce diversity and inclusion (D&I). I find that CEOs’ early-life diversity exposure is associated with more D&I policies, a greater representation of minorities and women in the workforce, and a lower probability of facing employee discrimination. Supporting a more causal interpretation, the diversity exposure effects depend on the level of integration in the CEO’s community while growing up, and the CEO’s control over firm policies. Moreover, using a difference-in-differences specification around plausibly exogenous CEO turnovers, to address the endogenous matching of CEOs to firms, provides consistent results. This chapter contributes to the recent literature that seeks to understand what drives diversity in firms. In Chapter 2 (co-authored with Paige Ouimet), we examine the economic implications of paid sick leave (PSL) mandates. The United States is one of few developed countries still without a national PSL policy. Uncertainty around the economic implications of PSL policies is a major reason why a federal law mandating PSL has failed to pass repeatedly. Using the staggered adoption of local and state mandates, we document an average increase of 1.5% in employment followingthe enactment of a PSL policy. As predicted, workers with ex ante lower access to PSL drive the employment effect. Several mechanisms can explain our findings. PSL mandates are associated with a decline in labor turnover, an increase in the labor supply, and an increase in household income, which creates positive spillover effects on local markets. Moreover, firms exposed to the mandate experience a significant increase in operating profit – benefits firms may not be able to achievethrough voluntary actions, in the absence of a mandate, due to adverse selection. In Chapter 3, I explore how managers become entrenched over time. The optimal view of managerial power theory suggests that corporate boards reward CEOs with power for good firm performance as the boards’ assessment of their ability is higher. In evaluating the CEO’s quality, economic theory predicts that boards filter out luck from performance. Luck represents exogenous shocks to performance, such as market-wide conditions, that are outside the CEO’s control. Contraryto the prediction, I find that CEOs are rewarded with power for luck. This finding is mainly driven by firms with weaker governance in terms of board structure and institutional ownership. This chapter contributes to the literature on managerial power and extends the pay for luck literature by showing that the rewards CEOs obtain due to luck extend to power and are not limited to direct monetary benefits.
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My book is not my baby — but the two do have a lot in common

For me, publishing a book isn't the same as giving birth. it's more like sending my child to preschool, by noa silver.

I remember in my first year of motherhood the way I felt my world grow smaller and more intimate , the pace of my life grow slower and more focused. When my husband would come home from coaching and consulting meetings, networking events, and the workshops he facilitated, he would find me ensconced in the tiny world of our home, wrapped up in the milky sweetness of the baby. The private, domestic realm became my primary realm during those early months of motherhood, when I would walk around and around our small apartment with my baby wrapped to my chest, murmuring “shh, shh,” over and over again, like a mantra, or a prayer. Her heart beating against my heart, recreating womb-like conditions on the outside.

In the same sun-drenched week in August, that baby, my elder daughter, started preschool and I signed a publishing contract for my debut novel, "California Dreaming ." Two years after that, my younger daughter has started at that same preschool, and "California Dreaming" is mere days from being released.

Like those early months of motherhood, writing is an intensely private, solitary act. For me, to write necessitates going inward, it requires shutting out the outside world and external stimuli for the sake of being able to listen fully. My writing process takes inspiration from Anne Lamott’s practice of the one-inch picture frame. All through my daughters’ early years, I would carve out pockets of time — while they napped, or after bedtime, or when they were at the playground — to write. My pace of writing my novel was complementary to the pace of motherhood, the pace of attending to a baby and then a toddler. Each day I wrote just 250 words, filling my one-inch frame.

I am not the first to notice the connection between writing and parenting , but while many have compared publishing a book to giving birth, for me there is an even more apt comparison. Both child and book lived in and then with me for many years after their births. For me, publishing a book feels most parallel to sending my child to preschool for the first time, for it is in both these acts that that which once lived solely inside the private, domestic realm, and within only a few primary relationships, now enters the public sphere.

The distinction between the public and private realms, the separation between domestic and political spheres, has long been deeply intertwined with the preservation of a capitalistic society. Mothering so often happens outside of the public sphere, outside of the public gaze, and much has been written about the hidden, unpaid labor of caretaking. In our society, there is a hiddenness inherent in the domestic realm and a hiddenness to the lives and experiences of women.

Like those early months of motherhood, writing is an intensely private, solitary act.

Perhaps the novel form itself could be considered a kind of public square, a forum in which human relationships, motivations, self-discovery, and journeying gets played out again and again through different lenses, and under different gazes. Historically, even in the context of the novel, significant female life experiences — childbirth and abortion, breastfeeding and postpartum depression —  have not been explored nearly as deeply as those life experiences of typical male self-development.

In my writing, I am drawn to exploring the inner lives of women, especially during moments of significant life transitions. In "California Dreaming," the main character is Elena, who, over the course of the novel, grows from a young, idealistic early 20-something, into a 30-year-old woman who reckons with the decisions she has made, the values she holds and the stories she has inherited. It is a bildungsroman, a story form that traces the general and spiritual coming-of-age process, and it is told in the first-person point of view, granting Elena herself the narrative voice to describe her journey. There is an intimacy in using the first-person, a way of drawing near to the narrator that allows for greater play and insight into the narrator’s own development, her way of viewing the world, her inner life.

In an interview with Terry Gross in 1985, the writer Grace Paley reflected, “When you write, you illuminate what’s hidden, and that’s a political act.” For many years, my primary world has been the private, domestic, intimate world of mothering little children and writing and rewriting and editing a novel. A hidden world. And now, gradually, there are bridges between the private and public realms, and that which has been hidden is becoming illuminated, revealed.

In the months after giving birth, I felt the deep truth of the fact that I was not fully separate from my children. And yet, as they have grown, we have each gone through periods of differentiation, of reasserting the boundaries of self. My children no longer exist primarily in a carrier or in my arms; they are no longer solely dyadic extensions of me. They go to school, they have thoughts and experiences and dreams and feelings and wishes that I am not witness to, and that they navigate with peers and teachers and the many other people who populate their life. They have relationships that are their own.

So, too, with my novel. For many years I worked in private tandem with the novel, with my own creative process. In the months since I signed my book deal, however, I have begun to experience the way my creative process—a process of unfolding, refining, listening, and responding—is being transmuted into an object, into something that will go out into the world, into the public sphere, and there take on a life of its own. We are differentiating, my book and I, and soon it will be in relationship with others, with readers who will encounter it as themselves, and form judgments, connections, and opinions about it that are distinct from my own.

Motherhood’s value has often been located in the fact that the children we are mothering will eventually become citizens of the larger society. Similarly, a book on its publishing journey—as I have newfound understanding and appreciation for—ultimately becomes a commodity. The publishing industry measures a book’s success in sales, and even my chance at publishing another book in the future may rest on the sales numbers of my first. In these months of preparing for my book’s launch, of asking bookstores and libraries to stock my book, and friends and family to pre-order, I have been struck by my own doubts of its inherent worth. To ask people to buy it , to spend money on it, has necessarily sent me diving into questions of its value : Will this book change your life? Must it be read? Will you like it? I don’t know.

For many years, my primary world has been the private, domestic, intimate world of mothering little children and writing and rewriting and editing a novel. A hidden world.

Here’s what I do know: it had to be written. It called to me again and again during the writing process itself, that private, intimate birthing and caring for of this idea, these characters, this story, this particular viewpoint on the whole messy endeavor that we call life, and I couldn’t not write it.

In many ways, this is the same way I feel toward mothering my children. I don’t know who they will become, or what they will or will not contribute to society. I mother them in this moment, now, because they are here, in front of me, whole and perfect and messy and complete human beings just as they are. I attend to them because I must, because I am called to with my whole self.

It can seem at times that worth and value exist exclusively in the public sphere, in the shared collective, in the process of being witnessed and incorporated into the greater whole. But when this greater whole is one whose meaning rests in capital, then worth and value become markers for how much something contributes to capital: the book that sells well, or the child who grows up to be a “productive” member of society—a worker, a voter, a consumer.

It is not that I am against a shared, collective space, not that I wish for more individualized and individualistic paths toward meaning — far from it. However, in the context of a public sphere that primarily operates in terms of product, output and money, the private realm can sometimes seem a place of refuge, a place where creative process and attentive mothering can actually coexist in harmony, for the sake of attention itself, for the sake of love—and not future production or consumption.

Yet, I wonder whether that coexistence can only occur out of the public gaze, in a hidden domain, or if it would be possible for it to thrive in the public sphere. What kind of relationships could we have, the witnessers and the witnessed, in which we could write and mother from a place of intimate curiosity, where we could do so in a way that feels held by others, by community, where it is neither solely a solitary, lonely endeavor, nor one whose worth is measured in a balance sheet?

Perhaps it is only in a novel where we can fully explore that possibility.

personal stories from writers

• What if I can't "savor every single moment" of their childhood?
• The "groupie," the ghostwriter and me
• My disapproving doctor father hated my work — but we had more in common than I thought

Noa Silver was born in Jerusalem and raised between Scotland and Maine. Her debut novel " California Dreaming " is due out in May.

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Book Review: Memoirist Lilly Dancyger’s penetrating essays explore the power of female friendships

This cover image released by Dial Press shows “First Love” by Lilly Dancyger. (Dial Press via AP)

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Who means more to you — your friends or your lovers? In a vivid, thoughtful and nuanced collection of essays, Lilly Dancyger explores the powerful role that female friendships played in her chaotic upbringing marked by her parents’ heroin use and her father’s untimely death when she was only 12.

“First Love: Essays on Friendship” begins with a beautiful paean to her cousin Sabina, who was raped and murdered at age 20 on her way home from a club. As little kids, their older relatives used to call them Snow White and Rose Red after the Grimm’s fairy tale, “two sisters who are not rivals or foils, but simply love each other.”

That simple, uncomplicated love would become the template for a series of subsequent relationships with girls and women that helped her survive her self-destructive adolescence and provided unconditional support as she scrambled to create a new identity as a “hypercompetent” writer, teacher and editor. “It’s true that I’ve never been satisfied with friendships that stay on the surface. That my friends are my family, my truest beloveds, each relationship a world of its own,” she writes in the title essay “First Love.”

The collection stands out not just for its elegant, unadorned writing but also for the way she effortlessly pivots between personal history and spot-on cultural criticism that both comments on and critiques the way that girls and women have been portrayed — and have portrayed themselves — in the media, including on online platforms like Tumblr and Instagram.

For instance, she examines the 1994 Peter Jackson film, “Heavenly Creatures,” based on the true story of two teenage girls who bludgeoned to death one of their mothers. And in the essay “Sad Girls,” about the suicide of a close friend, she analyzes the allure of self-destructive figures like Sylvia Plath and Janis Joplin to a certain type of teen, including herself, who wallows in sadness and wants to make sure “the world knew we were in pain.”

In the last essay, “On Murder Memoirs,” Dancyger considers the runaway popularity of true crime stories as she tries to explain her decision not to attend the trial of the man charged with killing her cousin — even though she was trained as a journalist and wrote a well-regarded book about her late father that relied on investigative reporting. “When I finally sat down to write about Sabina, the story that came out was not about murder at all,” she says. “It was a love story.”

Readers can be thankful that it did.

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Book Review: “Music and Mind”

Soprano Renée Fleming may be best known as “The People’s Diva,” but in recent years, she has developed an interest in the connection between music and health. In her latest book, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness , Fleming has curated an anthology of essays from experts in the fields of science, medicine, and the performing arts. Each chapter offers unique insight into music’s power to heal, connect, and shape us and the new areas of research examining why this is.

The book opens with a foreword by Dr. Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, who recounts the story of how he and Fleming first met. They were at a tony D.C. party attended by no fewer than three Supreme Court Justices shortly after Obergefell v. Hodges enshrined marriage equality into law in 2015. Tensions were high, particularly between justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, friends and fellow opera lovers who disagreed bitterly on this issue (and much else). But when Fleming got up to sing a few American folk songs with the hired band and Collins on six-string guitar, the atmosphere in the room changed entirely. Soon, the partygoers joined in the singing, including the justices, demonstrating music’s power to heal and bridge divides.

This encounter spurred a partnership between Collins and Fleming, who had just accepted an invitation to serve as an advisor to the Kennedy Center, to advance the field of study surrounding music as a healing art. They began by assessing achievements in music therapy and neuroscientific research on music’s powerful effects on the brain, deciding now was the time to put more energy and resources into this burgeoning field. Their partnership resulted in the Sound Helath Initiative, a cooperative between the Kennedy Center and the NIH, which has resulted in NIH research grants totalling $30 million as well as workshops, concerts, interdisciplinary projects, and finally, this book.

The 500-page anthology is composed of 41 chapters from 58 authors across the realms of science, literature, music, dance, visual arts, arts administration, education, and medicine. The ambitious collection casts a wide net to capture the endless ramifications of music in our lives. “With themes including the science of arts and health; creative arts therapies; artists, healing, and humanity; singing for health; and arts across the life span, Music and Mind has assembled the voices of leading figures in neuroscience and the musical and visual arts, providing an inspiring view of the emerging synthetic possibilities,” Collins writes.

In her introduction, Fleming outlines her own experiences of stage fright and performance anxiety and how turning to science helped her understand and overcome the physical manifestations that were threatening to derail her career. Her interest in the science behind music’s healing power intensified over the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated existing upward trends of chronic pain, depression, anxiety, social isolation, and political division. She even offered herself up as a guinea pig to further this research, spending hours inside an MRI machine as scientists recorded her brain activity while singing, listening, and imagining singing. (Interestingly, her brain was most activated when thinking about singing.)

In addition to compiling and editing this book, Fleming has toured a series of Music and Mind presentations in collaboration with arts and community organizations, health care providers, and researchers to offer audiences the chance to learn about how the art forms they love can contribute to health care and scientific discovery. You can watch one such presentation with one of the contributors to this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author (and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois) Richard Powers, televised by PBS affiliate KET.

In her introduction to Music and Mind , Fleming helpfully outlines the focus of each chapter and broader section, guiding the reader if they want to hop around to different chapters that interest them specifically. However, if you read the book from start to finish, the chapters are well-paced, alternating between scientific articles and artistic musings. The voices Fleming has assembled in this book are impressively diverse. Given the freedom to take the brief and run with it, each contributor brings their own deeply personal experiences of music and unique writing style to their chapters. These chapters run the gamut from rigorous scientific research to poetic love letters to music from writers such as Richard Powers and Ann Patchett.

If you wish to read about music’s role in the evolution of the human brain, Fleming points you to the essay by Dr. Aniruddh D. Patel, professor of psychology at Tufts University. If you are interested in the broad impacts of music education on child development, read Dr. Indre Viskontas’ chapter “Humans Are Musical Creatures: The Case for Music Education.” There are also numerous chapters about how music has helped the authors through various illnesses or how illnesses have affected the authors’ relationships with music, as in the essay by singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, who underwent brain surgery for Chiari malformation in 2007.

Some of the authors use the opportunity to plug their own research or projects they are currently working on. For instance, cellist Yo-Yo Ma uses the prompt to contemplate larger existential questions about our connection with nature and how tapping into cultural traditions can restore healthy relationships with the world around us. Ma is currently working on a project titled  Our Common Nature , where he visits sites that “epitomize nature’s potential to move the human soul, creating collaborative works of art and convening conversations that seek to strengthen our relationship to our planet and to one another.”

However much of the book you decide to read, be sure to start with the first chapter by Dr. Patel, “Musicality, Evolution, and Animal Responses to Music.” In this chapter, he poses a central question that will inform your reading of the rest of the book: “Is musical behavior, like spoken language, part of human nature? Or is music a purely cultural invention, a cherished tradition passed between generations but not engraved by evolution into our genes and minds?” In other words, is music borrowing evolved brain circuits used primarily in other functions, or did music have a hand in developing those circuits?

Patel argues that we are getting closer to being able to answer this age-old question with new tools and energy spent on the field of music neuroscience. He believes that our genes and culture evolved together (through “gene-culture coevolution”), yet strong evidence for this has been hard to pin down. “Musicality may be the first domain where this theory of mental evolution is convincingly demonstrated,” he says, supporting the broader implications and importance of studying music and the brain.

Overall, Music and Mind  has something for everyone, with scientific information that is rigorous enough for those with a scientific background yet accessible enough for the layman to understand and appreciate. The book reads like a cocktail party of some of the smartest and most interesting people around whose conversations you can dip in and out of at leisure. The assemblage of all these prestigious contributors adds further proof to the book’s thesis that music has the power to connect people from all walks of life.

These programs are partially sponsored by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

What does John Green's book of essays say about the Indy 500? About the Indianapolis nod

Author John Green is no stranger to Indianapolis and the Indy 500, which is Sunday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Green has many works in his back pocket, including several with nods to Indianapolis. It seems fitting to revisit some of the mentions as we wait for drivers to start their engines.

The IndyStar has several guides to get fans ready for the Greatest Spectacle in Racing including a printable starting lineup , how to tune in to the race from outside the racetrack and what people can bring to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

What to know about John Green and the Indy 500:

What does John Green's book of essays say about the Indy 500?

In " The Anthropocene Reviewed ," Green writes essays reviewing different topics from Halley's Comet to Diet Dr Pepper and even the Indianapolis 500, the IndyStar previously reported.

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He wrote the Indy 500 review during the pandemic.

“I wanted to write about my experience of suddenly being unable to go to the race, and how it felt to go through all the same rituals that I always go through on that Sunday, and to bike to the race as I always do and to arrive at an empty Speedway, with the gates locked shut."

"It can be hard at times because we have to get used to a new normal to be able to reflect on how much has been lost in the last year and a half," he said. "And obviously the loss of fans at the speedway wasn't one of the big losses, but it was a loss. One loss among billions. For me, it was a way to feel that."

But people don't have to feel that loss again as they can attend the race on Sunday.

The book, which was released in 2021, is his first work of nonfiction and is inspired by his podcast of the same name where he also published monthly reviews.

'The Anthropocene Reviewed': John Green's new nonfiction book finds wonder in Diet Dr Pepper, Indianapolis 500

What John Green books mention Indianapolis?

"The Fault in Our Stars" and "Turtles All the Way Down" are both situated in Indianapolis.

In the latter, there are many references to the city, including:

• White River
• Pogue's Run
• Michigan Road mansion
• Applebee’s at 86th and Ditch
• IU Health North Hospital
• The Indianapolis Star
• The Indianapolis Prize
• Juan Solomon Park

Others are reading: John Green’s ‘Turtles’ at home in Indianapolis

Is John Green from Indianapolis?

Not originally.

In his webpage , Green states that he grew up in Orlando. He moved to Indianapolis in 2007 when his wife got a job at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the IndyStar previously reported.

John Green on TikTok: Author still can't stop talking about how great Indianapolis is

How to watch 'Turtles All the Way Down'

The movie adaptation is now available streaming on Max .

When is the 2024 Indy 500?

This year's Indy 500 race is on Sunday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

David Lindquist, Rachel Fradette and Ethan May contributed to this article.