Real Writing

Real Essays Interactive Update Edition offers practical coverage of paragraph-to-essay writing skills in a brief, interactive, and affordable format. The print component offers the essentials of Anker’s accessible writing instruction along with select exercises.

High-school writing prompts often ask students to provide overly simplified responses to complicated issues, but a person’s stance in the real world can rarely, if ever, be reduced to “agree or disagree.” Arguments are complex, with more than two points of view and a range of evidence to consider; however, writing classes don’t always embrace that complexity. Real Writing: Modernizing the Old School Essay contends that engaging fully with complex texts and difficult, nuanced arguments helps students become better thinkers and writers, more fully prepared for life both in and after high school. By offering students current texts to read and issues to discuss, teachers introduce their students to more complex arguments. Real Writing: Modernizing the Old School Essay recognizes the value of various types of texts, but the need for contemporary readings in our literature and composition classes is important for relevancy related to student engagement, the Common Core State Standards, and participation in our democratic society. This book shares curricular moves to engage students in reading and writing authentic arguments.

LaunchPad for Real Writing Interactive Updated Edition is the online component. Visit macmillianhighered.com/rwinteractiveupdate.

Two seasoned veterans recount their 23-year collaboration to find ways to get students to improve their learning in their content area subjects. The two teachers, one an elementary-trained reading specialist and the other a secondary-trained science teacher, begin by telling of their mission to find what will work for them, rejecting and tiring of bandwagon movements and quick-fix promises, and finding the power of collaboration. In their subsequent chapters, they discuss practices and strategies for helping students read and become actively involved with books, lectures, and videos. Then they flesh out activities to help students write more effectively in the content areas. Every teaching strategy is one that they have used successfully with real students. And they have tracked improved grades and secured students' feedback about which strategies helped them the most.

Real Reading and Writing puts both reading skills and writing skills in a real-world context, showing students that good writing, reading, and thinking skills are both achievable and essential to their success in college and beyond. Miriam Moore, a developmental and ESL specialist from Lord Fairfax Community College, collaborated with Susan Anker to provide students with an integrated reading and writing package. Students connect reading and writing with their real lives through practical examples, model writing samples, and readings that are both engaging and relevant to their lives. To keep students from getting overwhelmed, the book focuses first on the most important concepts in each area, such as the Four Basics of the Reading and Writing Process; Four Basics of each rhetorical strategy; the Four Most Serious Errors in the grammar section; and the academic skills of summary, analysis, and synthesis

Author Miriam Moore believes in helping students learn to trust themselves as readers, writers, and thinkers. Writing Essentials Online: A Macmillan Launchpad provides a space where students can build both confidence and strong academic writing skills that will carry them forward in college and career. A portable print text, Real Writing Essentials works together with Writing Essentials Online to deliver just the support necessary in order to develop paragraphs and essays. It can be packaged with Writing Essentials Online at a significant discount.

How can we prepare the work-force of tomorrow for the increasing writing demands of the Information Age? Anne Beaufort provides a multidimensional response to this critical question. Offering a vital view of the developmental process entailed in attaining writing fluency in school and beyond, and the conditions that contribute to acquiring such expertise, Beaufort illuminates what it takes to foster the versatility writers must possess in the workplace of the twenty-first century.

Real-World Writers shows teachers how they can teach their pupils to write well and with pleasure, purpose and power. It demonstrates how classrooms can be transformed into genuine communities of writers where talking, reading, writing and sharing give children confidence, motivation and a sense of the relevance writing has to their own lives and learning. Based on their practical experience and what research says is the most effective practice, the authors share detailed guidance on how teachers can provide writing study lessons drawing on what real writers do and how to teach grammar effectively. They also share a variety of authentic class writing projects with accompanying teacher notes that will encourage children to use genres appropriately, creatively and flexibly. The authors’ simple yet comprehensive approach includes how to teach the processes and craft knowledge involved in creating successful and meaningful texts. This book is invaluable for all primary practitioners who wish to teach writing for real.

Click here to find out more about the 2009 MLA Updates and the 2010 APA Updates. Real Essays with Readings is the essay-level book in Susan Anker’s highly successful series of writing texts that motivate students with their message that writing is an essential skill in college and in real life — and that this skill is achievable. Anker’s advice, examples, and assignments show the relevance of writing to all aspects of students’ lives, and profiles of former students prove that success is attainable. Like all the books in the Anker series, Real Essays presents writing in logical, manageable increments: step-by-step writing guides and a focus on the "four basics" of each mode of writing keep students from becoming overwhelmed. Real Essays maintains its emphasis on what really matters by focusing on the four most serious errors (fragments, run-ons, subject-verb agreement problems, and verb form problems). Real Essays gives students what they need to succeed in college and become stronger academic writers.

This New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, is "hilarious . . . a riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend" (The Washington Post). It’s the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America’s most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry. Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life. Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them.