The Concise St. Martin’s Guide to Writing 7th Edition

Book Preface

When we fi rst wrote The Concise St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, our goal was to provide students with the clear guidance and practical strategies they needed to harness their potential as writers — an achievement that will be key to their success in college, at work, and in the wider world. We also wanted to provide instructors with the hands-on tools they needed to help their students write with a clear understanding of their rhetorical situation. Our goals have remained the same, and so The Concise St. Martin’s Guide retains the core features that over the years have drawn so many instruc tors and programs to the Concise Guide. But now it also includes many new features that we believe will keep the Concise Guide the most practical hands-on text for teachers and students.

Core Features of the Concise Guide

The Concise St. Martin’s Guide retains its emphasis on active learning — learning by doing — by providing practical guides to writing, promoting genre awareness to aid the transfer of writing skills from one genre or context to another, and integrating reading and writing through hands-on activities of critical thinking, reading, and analysis.

Practical Guides to Writing

Each chapter in Part One offers practical, fl exible guides that help students draft and revise essays in a variety of analytical and argumentative genres. Commonsensical and easy to follow, these writing guides teach students to

• assess the rhetorical situation, focusing on their purpose and audience, with special attention to the genre and medium in which they are writing;
• ask probing analytical questions;
• practice finding answers through various kinds of research, including memory search, field research, and traditional source-based research.

These flexible guides to writing begin with a Starting Points chart to offer students multiple ways of fi nding the help they need when they need it. Each also includes a Critical Reading Guide to help students assess their own writing and the writing of their classmates and a Troubleshooting Guide to help students fi nd ways to improve their drafts. All these guides are organized and color-coded to emphasize the genre’s basic features. In short, the Guides to Writing help students make their writing thoughtful, clear, organized, and compelling — in a word, effective for the rhetorical situation.