Publisher's Synopsis
The goal of Write It Review is to reinforce the academic reading and writing skills you learned in Write It. Each section of Write It Review, just as in Write It, helps you develop a range of writing strategies. As you are guided through the writing process, you learn how to use each stage to maximize its benefits. Using the strategies this book teaches will help you strengthen the confidence and understanding you need to write effective academic essays. As you work through the assignments and exercises in Write It Review, be sure to complete all the activities, and give special attention to activities devoted to building reading comprehension and idea development skills. If you have already worked through Write It, you likely have adjusted some of the stages in the writing process to suit your own methods and approaches to writing assignments; however, it is important that you reassess the process you are using. In this way, you will focus on areas that need improvement and thereby maximize the potential of Write It Review. As you work through the writing process for each assignment, remember the series of skills we introduced in Write It that are necessary for producing a successful essay: focused reading, critical thinking, careful analysis, marshaling of evidence, drafting and editing. Write It Review's exercises will guide you through each stage in the production of an essay, and will encourage you to practice each skill, one stage at a time. As you go through the writing process step by step, remember that writing is always a recursive activity and when you begin a paper you may not always begin at step one with your topic and proceed in a linear way, one step at a time, to proofreading. As you move through the guiding exercises Write It Review provides, new ideas will come to you. Don't set these discoveries aside, but carry them forward into the remaining exercises. As you relate old and new information, you will explore each assignment's topic from several angles so that your ideas will build on one another. In this way the steps, though done in isolation, will come together in a unified perspective. The organization of this book is intended to help reinforce your understanding of essay-building as a process not a formula, the stages as necessary steps to internalize until each becomes an intuitive part of writing itself. Write It Review's activities, exercises, and assignments will be familiar to those of you who have used Write It. The book is organized to guide you through each stage in the writing process, each unit beginning with a central reading and then moving through a sequence for essay development, from "Questions to Guide Your Reading," to "Questions to Guide Your Writing." A peer draft review form and a personal assessment form will help you revise and edit your essay. You will also find class discussion and homework activities that reinforce grammar, comprehension, and critical thinking skills. Following the assignment units is a section that contains student essays, and you will be able to read and evaluate the essays other students have written in response to similar essay topics. Like Write It, Write It Review is designed to encourage you not just to become a writer of college essays, but also to become a reader and writer in college. We hope that, as you become a proficient college writer, and exchange ideas with others in the academic community, you will both shape and be shaped by that community. Your experiences are unique to you, and your writing will reflect the knowledge you've accumulated from those experiences as you engage with others in defining the world in which we all live.
