Sections
Academic culture, operating in
Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove.
Aisenberg, Nadya and Mona Harrington. (1988). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. [Paperback]
Summary: The authors examine women’s struggles to gain authority in the academic profession by identifying “a battery of danger points common to the experience of women seeking professional autonomy and authority” in academia. The authors explore the variety of ways women in academia have responded to the “rules of the game” and offer strategies for academic professionalism.
Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing.
Fox, Helen. (1994). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. [Paperback]
Summary: Fox explores why students from other cultures often find it difficult to learn academic writing and understand its purpose in the U.S. university. She discusses how writing is influenced by cultures where people communicate differently and what happens to students when they try to modify their writing and thinking styles to produce analytical papers in the Western context.
Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing (Studies in Written Language and Literacy, No 5)
Ivanic, Roz. (1998). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamin Publishing. [Paperback]
Summary: Writing is not just about conveying ‘content’ but also about the representation of self. Academic writing often poses a conflict of identity for students. Ivanic claims that writing is an act of identity in which people align themselves with socio-culturally shaped subject positions, thereby playing their part in reproducing or challenging dominant practices and discourses, and the values, beliefs and interests which they embody.
Women Writing the Academy: Audience, Authority, and Transformation (Studies in Writing and Rhetoric).
Kirsch, Gesa E. (1993). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. [Paperback]
Summary: Kirsch investigates, through extensive interviews how women in different academic disciplines perceive and describe their experiences as writers in the university. She focuses on the writing strategies of successful women writers, their ways of establishing authority, and the kinds of audiences they address in different disciplinary settings.
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“How to” guides to writing, organizing ideas, argumentation, etc.
Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom.
Bean, John C. (2001). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons. [Paperback]
Summary: The author of this book discusses numerous strategies for facilitating active learning, writing, and critical thinking. He offers teachers suggestions for designing courses, making assignments, critiquing student work, and modeling critical thinking for students. He emphasizes transforming students from passive to active learners.
The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, 5th Ed.
Cooper, Axelrod and Charles Cooper. (1997). New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. [Hardcover]
Summary: Used by over a million students, this text is everything you need to help with your writing. A complete guide to the writing process, with thirty-eight readings by professional and student writers, it provides detailed guidelines for all the different tasks you may encounter. In addition, coverage of critical thinking strategies, research, and essay examinations will serve you well not just in your composition class but in all your college courses.
Work in Progress: A Guide to Academic Writing and Revising.
Ede, Lisa. (2004). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins. [Paperback]
Summary: In its 6th edition, this book remains a brief, practical rhetoric that teaches writing as a series of choices students have to make, giving them easy-to-use guidelines they can apply to a variety of writing situations both in college and beyond. There are new chapters on argument, argument analysis, and document design, each demonstrating that a rhetorical approach is key to any kind of writing.
Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process.
Elbow, Peter. (1981). New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Paperback]
Summary: A practical handbook for anyone who needs to write, from the student writing an essay to the professional writer working on a story to the manager writing a memo for a tight deadline. “Writing with power doesn’t just mean getting power over readers. It means getting power over yourself and over the writing process: knowing what you are doing as you write; figuring out what you really mean; being in charge, having control; not feeling stuck or helpless or intimidated.”
Improve Your Writing, 5th Ed.
Fry, Ron. (2005). Clifton Park, NY: Thomson. [Paperback]
Summary: This book presents all the elements important to turning in an excellent research paper by walking you through each step in the writing process from selecting a topic to proofreading your final draft. Fry provides updated and expanded information about online research and provides a fundamental, step-by-step approach that can be applied to any kind of writing.
Tutor critique: In the 1st six chapters, Fry promotes his other books more than giving any useful information. His style examples are MLA, not APA. In general, he seemed to be aiming it at a high school or college undergrad audience. There are some useful tips starting in Chapter 7. I liked Chapter 9 about the revision process.
Publish or Perish—The Educator's Imperative: Strategies for Writing Effectively for Your Profession and Your School.
Glatthorn, Allan A. (2002). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press Inc. [Paperback, 2 copies]
Summary: The author guides education professionals through the basics of the writing process, offering tools to create and enhance their own professional submissions and writings. Key features include finding a topic, correctly identifying your audience, choosing the appropriate forum, revising and editing, working with editors, and maximizing use of the internet.
Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts.
Harris, Joseph. (2006). Logan, UT: University of Utah Press. [Paperback]
Summary: Knowing that in academia scholars will often be asked to situate their thoughts about an issue relative to what others have written about it, Harris advises writers to imagine themselves as writing around the visible traces of texts from other authors but without plagiarizing or engaging in dreary repetition. He offers clear, effective strategies—or what he calls “moves”—for engaging in intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity.
A TA's Guide to Teaching Writing in All Disciplines.
Hedengren, Beth Finch. (2004). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins. [Paperback]
Summary: A TA's Guide provides the practical advice that teaching assistants – no matter the discipline – need in order to teach and evaluate writing effectively. This informative text is perfectly suited to a teaching assistants' training course, or it can serve as a reference for teaching assistants to use on their own.
Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision.
Kamler, Barbara and Pat Thomson. (2006). NY, NY: Routledge. [Paperback]
Summary: The authors provide a new framework for scholarly work located in personal, institutional and cultural contexts based on the notion of writing as a social practice and supervising as a way to teach novice doctoral writers to handle words as they enter the discursive practices of scholarly communities. The authors offer practical advice on the proposal, the journal abstract, the literature review, and constructing an argument.
Research Paper Handbook: Your Complete Guide, 3rd Ed.
Lester, James D., Jr, and James D. Lester Sr. (2005). Tucson, AZ: Good Year Press. [Paperback]
Summary: This 3rd Edition is a step-by-step guide to writing effective research papers while avoiding common pitfalls. You’ll learn how to establish a research topic, take notes and draft outlines, find useful information from various media, use the correct documentation style, etc.
A Writer's Resource: A Handbook for Writers and Researchers.
Maimon, Elaine. (2002). Boston: McGraw Hill [Paperback]
Summary: This English grammar handbook provides guidelines and models for college writing. It contains information about documentation styles, including MLA and APA, issues of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and mechanics of writing.
Just Who Do We Think We Are?: Methodologies For Self Study in Education.
Mitchell, Claudia, Sandra Weber, and Kathleen O’Reilly-Scanlon. (2005). New York: RoutledgeFalmer. [Paperback]
Summary: This collection of self-studies brings together an international range of self-studies carried out in teacher education, each of which has a different perspective to offer on issues of method and methodology, including memory work, fictional practice, collaborative autobiography, auto-ethnography, phenomenology, and image-based approaches.
The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing: Concise Edition (4th Ed.).
Ramage, John D., John C. Bean and June Johnson. (2006). Pearson Longman.
Summary: Designed to be a college textbook, the Guide to Writing has chapters covering how to pose and write about a specific problem, how to think, read, and write rhetorically, writing a classical argument, and writing as a problem-solving process.
Writing Analytically.
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. (2006). Boston, MA: Thomson. [Paperback]
Summary: The authors of this book offer specific guidance that helps you become a strong analytical thinker and writer. The authors present a sequence of strategies that show you how to use the process of analysis to develop original and well-developed ideas. In this book you’ll find many writing tools such as syntax and diction exercises, how habits of mind tend to get in the way of good writing and thinking, and other exercises to stimulate your writing.
The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors.
Ryan, Leigh and Lisa Zimmerelli. (2006). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins. [Paperback]
Summary: This is a reference tool and resource for writing tutors which offers practical suggestions for working with the variety of assignments and situations they are apt to encounter with students. It includes discussions of ideal tutoring sessions as well as strategies for resolving the various writing problems students have.
Rules of Thumb: A Guide for Writers, 4th Ed.
Silverman, Jay, Elaine Hughes, and Diana Roberts Wienbroer. (2000). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.
Summary: This guide reduces each writing problem to a few practical points that can be used easily. It doesn’t attempt to cover every little detail of grammar and usage, but it does cover the most common problems the authors have seen over the past 25 years. Sections include Correctness—rules about the most common mistakes; Putting a Paper Together—stages of writing an essay; Meeting Specific Assignments—help for when you have to write under pressure; and Writing with Elegance—ways to grow as a writer.
The Craft of Argument (2nd Ed.).
Williams, Joseph M. and Gregory G. Colomb. (2003). New York: Addison Wesley Longman. [Paperback]
Summary: This 2nd edition of this successful text focuses on problem finding and problem solving in planning, drafting, and revising arguments. It gives an overview of the nature of, elements of, as well as language use in, effective argumentation. It also provides several examples of successful arguments.
On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.
Zinsser, William. (2006). New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers. [Paperback]
Summary: This is a book about the craft of writing, first written 30 years ago and still a classic resource. It contains writing principles for students, teachers, and people who want to learn how to write and even more re-write, non-fiction. The author explains how he has made the same decisions that confront every writer: matters of selection, reduction, organization, and tone.
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Reference: dictionaries, style books, grammar, etc.
The Little, Brown Compact Handbook, Fifth Edition.
Aaron, Jane E. (2004). New York, NY: Pearson Longman. [Paperback]
Summary: This is an English language grammar handbook containing basic information on generating ideas, designing an academic essay, crafting an argument, using commas, citing sources, and searching the Internet among other skills. Special notes provide rhetorical and grammatical help for writers whose first language is not standard American English. The Handbook contains sections for the primary academic writing styles: APA, MLA, Chicago and CSE.
The Norton Field Guide to Writing.
Bullock, Richard. (2006). New York: W. W. Norton & Company. [Paperback]
Summary: This “guide” covers 15 kinds of writing often assigned to college students in the form of guidelines designed to help students consider the choices they have as writers. Bullock keeps chapters brief but has added color-coded links to places in the book where students can find more information on rhetorical situations, genres, processes, strategies, research/documentation, and media/design.
The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.
Lindeberg, Christine. (Compiler) (2004).New York, NY: Oxford University Press. [Hardcover]
Summary: This exceptional thesaurus contains more than 300,000 synonyms and 10,000 antonyms. It is arranged alphabetically for easy reference and includes rare, literary, and slang words. Other features include “word spectrums” (delineating the shades of meaning between opposite words), effective guides to distinguishing close synonyms, 50 important points in American English usage, and mini-essays on the importance of word choice.
The New Oxford American Dictionary.
McKean, Erin (Ed.) (2005). New York: Oxford University Press. [Hardcover]
Summary: This American-English dictionary contains more than 250,000 definitions and entries organized around major core meanings and supplemented by illustrative examples of usage. It covers new words in every area from computers, medicine and science, to politics, entertainment, and popular culture.
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition. (2006). Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc. [Paperback]
Summary: This new edition of America’s college-level desk dictionary contains reference information, including definitions, new words and meanings, pronunciations, usage examples, etymologies, idioms, and pictorial illustrations.
Common Sense: A Handbook and Guide for Writers.
Polnac, Lennis, Lyman Grant, and Tom Cameron. (1999). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. [Paperback]
Summary: A concise handbook that presents writing concepts in a nontechnical language with frequent examples. The authors use an “inductive/intuitive presentation” of major concepts, and provide a tutorial preface on how to effectively use the book. The connection between oral and written language is highlighted to help writers convert their ideas into writing.
Quick Access: Reference for Writers, 2nd Ed.
Troyka, Lynn Q. (1998). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. [Paperback]
Summary: Easy to reference handbook with sections on writing process, thinking and reading critically, grammar basics, correct sentences, effective sentences and words, punctuation, mechanics, research writing, APA, MLA, and a focus on ESL.
What Every Student Should Know About Avoiding Plagiarism.
Stern, Linda. (2007). New York: Pearson Longman. [Paperback]
Summary: This slim guide offers instruction and models for how to summarize, paraphrase, and quote sources. Includes a thorough exploration of the various manifestations of plagiarism, followed by a brief APA/MLA style primer.
The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition.
Strunk, Jr., William et al. (2000). New York: Longman. [Paperback]
Summary: This is an English language grammar manual. It contains elementary principles of writing composition, grammar and an approach to writing style. Each rule or principle in this book is followed by a short example.
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Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis.
Bolker, Joan. (1998). New York: Henry Holt and Co. [Paperback]
Summary: The author offers strong, practical advice and strategies to dissertation writers for creating individual work plans that will promote productivity. She offers suggestions for blocked writers and includes advice on setting short-term deadlines, choosing dissertation topics and advisors, and revising and finishing a dissertation
How to Prepare a Dissertation Proposal: Suggestions for Students in Education & the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Krathwohl, David R. and Nick L. Smith. (2005). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. [Paperback]
Summary: This book is an assembly manual for a dissertation proposal, helping the writer to understand the “why” of what is called for, how your proposal can advance your relations with your faculty mentors, how each part of the proposal fits into and contributes to a larger whole, and the logic that comprises that larger whole that will be represented in your proposal. The authors include worksheets to put assembly into practice.
Successful Dissertations and Theses: A Guide to Graduate Student Research from Proposal to Completion.
Madsen, David. (1992). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. [Paperback]
Summary: This is an academic handbook where one learns about long-term planning, avoiding self-defeating strategies, and negotiating with advisors. Model papers are shown at various stages of development to clarify the steps in proposing, outlining, writing, defending, and possibly publishing a dissertation. The author also explains how to devise and adhere to a realistic timetable for completion.
Surviving Your Dissertation: A Comprehensive Guide to Content and Process.
Rudestam, Kjell Erik and Rae R. Newton. (2001).Sage Publications. [Paperback]
Summary: This book gives doctoral students guidance on how to improve their writing and offers concrete strategies on how to deal with writing difficulties. It also discusses writing a qualitative dissertation and presenting qualitative research results.
A Handbook for Doctoral Supervisors.
Taylor, Stan and Nigel Beasley. (2005). New York: Routledge. [Paperback]
Summary: This handbook focuses on the practical needs of doctoral supervisors in meeting the demands of a changing candidate population. Using self-interrogation to encourage readers to reflect on their supervisory techniques, it addresses such issues as supporting candidates of all nationalities and backgrounds, supporting the research project, and evaluation and dissemination of good practice.
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Research
The Craft of Research, 2nd Ed.
Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph M. Williams. (2003). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Paperback]
Summary: Since 1995, students, researchers, and other professionals have turned to this book for clear and helpful guidance on how to conduct research and report it effectively. This new edition will continue to help writers plan, carry out, and report on research. It has added coverage on evaluating the reliability of internet sources, visually representing data, and citing electronic sources.
What Every Student Should Know About Researching Online.
Campbell, Shireen and Dave Munger. (2007). New York, NY: Pearson Longman. [Paperback]
Summary: Teaches students how to conduct research on the Web using search engines and databases. This slim volume explains how to judge sources, document materials, and avoid plagiarism. Annotated screen shots of Web pages show students where to locate the information they need to create a proper citation, while comprehensive coverage of online and electronic citation models are also provided.
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APA Style
What Every Student Should Know About Citing Sources with APA Documentation.
Anderson, Chalon E., Amy Carrell and Jimmy Widdifield, Jr. (2007). New York, NY: Pearson Longman. [Paperback]
Summary: An invaluable resource for any student following APA guidelines. This slim guidebook provides specific instructions on writing and referencing in APA style, including a sample manuscript and exercises to practice arranging components.
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Fifth Edition.
(2001). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. [Paperback]
Summary: This is an easy-to-use reference manual for writers, editors, students, and educators. It provides clear guidance on grammar, the mechanics of writing, APA style, and an easy-to-use reference and citation system. It also comprehensively covers the treatment of numbers, statistical and mathematical data, tables and figures for use in reports or presentations.
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