Steps in Composition / Edition 8

by Lynn Troyka, Jerrold Nudelman

Overview

This time-honored, comprehensive program for basic writers features a unique instructional format that combines the fundamentals of grammar, mechanics, rhetoric, vocabulary, and spelling, with contemporary topics of interest and participatory exercises that require readers to get fully involved by creating, changing, rewriting, or correcting. Using an integrated “whole language” approach and continual reinforcement of skills, this book caters to users' intelligence and interests. KEY TOPICS It features instructional material on all nine modes of discourse—description, narration, exemplification, process, comparison and contrast, definition, cause and effect, classification, and argumentation. MARKET: For the development of writing skills and the creation of effective writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780131100695
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	12/08/2003
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

The eighth edition of this widely adopted text maintains the authors' proven formula for successful writing-the integration of reading, rhetoric, grammar, spelling, and vocabulary-and includes many refinements and new features to ensure that STEPS IN COMPOSITION remains the best resource available for writing classrooms.

With the addition of descriptive, narrative, example, comparison and contrast, classification, and cause and effect essays, STEPS IN COMPOSITION now covers nine patterns of essay development-making the text more complete than ever.

www.prenhall.com/troyka This free website for students provides additional thematically arranged readings online. For each reading, students can answer "Before You Read" and "Reading Survey" questions. There are also self-graded vocabulary quizzes, paragraph-editing exercises, and writing prompts for each selection.

Table of Contents

(Each chapter begins with Springboards to Thinking and ends with Refresher Exercise and Springboards to Writing.)

1. Essay: “Rambos of the Road” by Martin Gottfried. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of Road Rage, Part I. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of Road Rage, Part II. Spelling: Methods to Improve Your Spelling. The Writing Process. Prewriting Techniques. Purposes for Writing. Audience. The Topic Sentence. Paragraph Development, Part I.


2. Essay: “Fire, Hope, and Charity” by Jeanne Marie Laskas. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of a Troubled Society. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of a Healthy Society. Spelling: Sound-Alikes. Paragraph Development, Part II. Ordering of Details in a Paragraph. Revising a Paragraph.


3. Essay: “My Daughter Smokes” by Alice Walker. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of Cigarette Addiction, Part I. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of Cigarette Addiction, Part II. Spelling: Spelling Rule — Changing y to i. The Sentence Fragment. Comma Splices and Run-On Sentences.


4. Essay: “Pursuit of Happiness” by Dympna Ugwu-Oju. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of Women in a Traditional Culture. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of Women in Mainstream America. Spelling: Proofreading. Coordination. Subordination. A Special Case of Subordination.


5. Essay: “The Black Table Is Still There” by Lawrence Otis Graham. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of Racism, Part I. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of Racism, Part II. Spelling: Capitalization. The -s Verb Ending. Agreement of Subject and Verb. Irregular Verbs. The -ed Verb Ending. Verb Tense Consistency.


6. Essay: “The Ugly Truth about Beauty” by Dave Barry. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of Self-Image, Part I. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of Self-Image, Part II. Spelling: Commonly Confused Words. Pronoun Choice. Pronoun Agreement. Pronoun Reference and Consistency.


7. Essay: “Teenagers in Dreamland” by Robert J. Samuelson. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of Today's Adolescent Subculture, Part I. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of Today's Adolescent Subculture, Part II. Spelling: Spelling Rule —ie and ei. From Paragraph Principles to Essay Writing. Finding a Writing Topic, Drafting a Thesis Statement, Forming Main Body Ideas. The Introductory Paragraph. The Concluding Paragraph. Revising an Essay.


8. Essay: “Abortion Is Too Complex to Feel All One Way About” by Anna Quindlen. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of the Pro-Choice Movement. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of the Right-to-Life Movement. Spelling: The Apostrophe. The Comma. Other Marks of Punctuation.


9. Essay: “Rapping Nasty” by James Earl Hardy. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of Censorship, Part I. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of Censorship, Part II. Spelling: Plurals. The Unified Essay. Words of Transition. Key Words: Deliberate Repetition.


10. Essay: “The Sins of the Parents” by Ellen Goodman. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building.Lesson One: The Vocabulary of the Troubled Family. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of the Untroubled Family. Spelling: To Split or Not to Split. Using the Right Word. Informal Language.


11. Essay: “Money and Freedom” by Marshall Glickman. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of the Financial World. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of Avoiding Burnout. Spelling: Spelling Rule — Dropping the Final e. Parallelism, Misplaced Modifiers, Dangling Modifiers.


12. Essay: “The Shadow of a Stranger” by Wally Lamb. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of a Violent Society, Part I. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of a Violent Society, Part II. Spelling: Doubling. The Descriptive Essay. The Narrative Essay. The Example Essay. The Process Essay.


13. Essay: “The Way We Lie” by Stephanie Ericsson. Reading Survey. Vocabulary Building. Lesson One: The Vocabulary of Lying, Part I. Lesson Two: The Vocabulary of Lying, Part II. Spelling: Prefixes and Suffixes. The Comparison/Contrast Essay. The Classification Essay. The Cause and Effect Essay. The Definition Essay. The Argument Essay.


Appendix I: Critical Thinking — Logic.


Appendix II: Common Prefixes and Suffixes.


Appendix III: Spelling Demons.


Index.

Preface

This eighth edition of Steps in Composition continues to reflect our conviction that writing is a lively, engaging activity that helps students to fulfill their personal and professional goals. Our approach to teaching writing is both practical and pedagogically sound. To encourage student success, we use a number of essential elements:

• Engaging visuals elicit responses as each chapter begins.
• Contemporary, thought-provoking reading selections on the same theme as the visuals stimulate critical thinking and promote effective reading skills.
• Comprehensive discussions of rhetoric, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary building, and spelling provide jargon-free explanations and clear examples.
• Frequent Try It Out mini-exercises throughout the instructional material help students to reinforce their learning as they go along.
• Exercises are sequenced from basic practice to participatory applications, a research-based progression that transfers well to actual writing.
• Informative, entertaining exercise content includes news items with universal themes and fascinating facts to keep student interest high.
• Numerous charts help students use the text as an out-of-class reference tool.
• Extensive lists of topics for writing both paragraphs and essays stimulate student writing on a variety of contemporary issues.

To ensure that Steps in Composition remains both current and comprehensive, this eighth edition has been expanded to include thirteen chapters and several new features:

• Chapters 12 and 13 contain detailed information on all nine major patterns of essay development: description, narration, exemplification, process, comparison/contrast, classification, cause/effect, definition, and argumentation. Each rhetorical mode is illustrated with three model essays and is supported by guided writing exercises that give students the opportunity to reinforce learning.
• Five of the thirteen essays are new and are accompanied by new Reading Survey questions and vocabulary materials.
• The new design enhances the text's usefulness as a reference tool. The pages in all grammar and rhetoric sections are bordered in blue, to help students find these important materials in a chapter. In addition, a boldface heading now introduces each grammar rule or rhetorical concept, making it easier for students to retrieve information on a page.

We retain the features added to our previous revisions and continue to use the same chapter organization and instructional framework, one that offers an integration of writing instruction with reading, vocabulary building, and spelling. All thirteen chapters feature:

SPRINGBOARDS TO THINKING. Photographs, cartoons, graphs, advertisements, and an artwork—accompanied by stimulating questions— get students' thinking started on a contemporary issue that forms each chapter's theme. In this edition, themes range from road rage to race relations, from gender issues to troubled families.

ESSAY. Lively discussions of thought-provoking topics focus on each chapter's theme. Several new essays are included together with some of our favorites from the previous edition. Among the authors represented in this eighth edition are Dave Barry, Ellen Goodman, Alice Walker, Martin Gottfried, Anna Quindlen, and Wally Lamb.

READING SURVEY. Questions center on main ideas, major details, inferences, and opinions. This sequence is designed to move students toward critical reading skills by leading them from literal meaning to inferential reasoning to evaluative thinking.

VOCABULARY BUILDING. Words from each chapter's essay are clustered around each chapter's theme. In this eighth edition, students learn and practice, for example, the vocabulary of self-image, of today's adolescent subculture, of a violent society. Simple, functional definitions are given within a context, and exercises encourage inductive thinking. For supplementary practice or quizzes, our Instructor's Resource Manual offers additional exercises for all lessons.

SPELLING: Lessons on spelling rules or patterns are accompanied by exercises that force students to focus on the individual letters in a word. An alphabetical list of spelling demons in Appendix III serves as an easy reference for students who want to check the spelling of a troublesome word.

KEY STEPS IN GRAMMAR OR RHETORIC. These sections, the heart of each chapter, cover skill areas central to successful writing. Clear, functional explanations are used while complicated terminology and minor rules are avoided. Spaced throughout are brief Try It Out exercises to reinforce learning in smaller steps than the chapter's culminating exercises permit. To enhance the transfer of learning from an exercise to an actual piece of writing, the exercise sequence provides participatory experiences. That is, never do students merely put checkmarks next to correct answers; instead, students complete, rewrite, create, or otherwise become directly involved with the skill. For use as supplementary practice or quizzes, a collection of additional exercises on all key grammar and rhetoric topics can be found in our Instructor's Resource Manual. The grammatical and rhetorical skills included in this eighth edition are:

• Using the writing process and prewriting strategies
• Determining purposes for writing
• Identifying an audience
• Writing effective topic sentences
• Developing paragraphs with full details and in logical order
• Revising a paragraph
• Writing mature, rich sentences rather than sentence fragments, comma splices, or run-ons
• Using correct verb forms
• Using pronouns correctly
• Applying paragraph principles to the expository essay—with special attention to finding a writing topic, drafting a thesis statement, forming main body ideas, and writing introductory and concluding paragraphs
• Revising an essay
• Using all marks of punctuation correctly
• Writing a unified essay
• Using the appropriate word
• Using parallelism and modifiers correctly
• Writing an essay that follows one of the nine major patterns of development: description, narration, exemplification, process, comparison/contrast, classification, cause/effect, definition, and argumentation

The order in this text is flexible. Chapters can be used in whatever sequence suits personal needs and preferences. Material can be omitted, rearranged, or added without interfering with underlying pedagogical principles. The Instructor's Resource Manual includes sample syllabi showing how to modify the organization of Steps in Composition to fit a variety of course outlines.

REFRESHER. This final exercise of the chapter, derived from the chapter's theme, invites students to apply their learning acquired in this and previous chapters. This exercise appears in a handwriting typeface to symbolize the need for correction.

SPRINGBOARDS TO WRITING. This long list of suggested topics for paragraphs and essays is based on each chapter's theme. Presented in the context of the writing process, the topics offer students the opportunity to explore their thinking as well as to practice their skills.