Focus on Writing
This first-year composition rhetoric-reader uses a Writing about Writing (WAW) approach and a conversational style to help students engage in threshold concepts and transfer what they know about writing to new situations. Each chapter asks a key question such as “Why Write?” or “What Is the Rhetorical Situation and Why Should I Care about It?”…
Fairy Tales in Popular Culture
It wasn’t so long ago that the fairy tale was comfortably settled as an established and respectable part of children’s literature. Since the fairy tale has always been a mirror of its times, however, we should not be surprised that in the latter part of the twentieth century it turned dark and ambiguous; its categorical…
Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain
Though working-class women in the nineteenth century included many accomplished and prolific poets, their work has often been neglected by critics and readers in favour of comparable work by men. Questioning the assumption that few poems by working-class women had survived, Florence Boos set out to discover supposedly lost works in libraries, private collections, and…
On Still Learning to Write
[Laurie McMillan, author of Focus on Writing shares her thoughts on the process of learning to write.] One of my healthiest coping mechanisms is my ability to laugh at myself. I had plenty of occasion to do so as I worked on Focus on Writing: What College Students Want to Know for Broadview Press. This composition textbook…