The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings

by Richard Bullock, Deborah Bertsch, Maureen Daly Goggin

Overview

The best-selling rhetoric that is as flexible as writing and teaching is today.

More widely assigned than any other rhetoric, The Norton Field Guide to Writing prioritizes flexibility and choice for both students and instructors. It supports a variety of teaching contexts and approaches—from genres to rhetorical strategies, co-requisite to dual enrolled, online to in-person, one semester to two. Its user-friendly design makes it easy to navigate in any format, with short chapters, unique cross references to more detail, annotated examples, and embedded videos in the ebook. The Seventh Edition offers even more ways to inspire student agency with new advice that explores generative AI and learning online; new prompts that foster remix and transfer of writing to varied situations; new readings that provide refreshed models; and an expansion of the resources that teachers most loved in previous editions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324087434
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/01/2025
Edition description:	Seventh Edition
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Richard Bullock is emeritus professor of English at Wright State University, where he directed the writing programs for 28 years and designed the university's writing across the curriculum program and Introduction to College Writing Workshop. In 2012, he was awarded the Trustees' Award for Faculty Excellence, Wright State's highest honor. In addition to The Norton Field Guide to Writing, he is a coauthor of The Little Seagull Handbook.

Deborah Bertsch is coauthor of The Norton Field Guide to Writing and Professor of English at Columbus State Community College, where she’s also served as writing center coordinator and dual enrollment lead faculty. A past chair of the Two-Year College English Association-Midwest, Bertsch has won a Diana Hacker Outstanding Program award from NCTE, a Campus Technology Impact Award from Campus Technology magazine, and a Distinguished Full Professor Award from her college.

Maureen Daly Goggin is Professor of English and former associate chair of the English Department at Arizona State University, where she has also directed several of the writing programs and the Ph.D. program in Rhetoric, Composition, and Linguistics and received the ASU Alumni Association Faculty Teaching Award. She is the author of several scholarly books, including Authoring a Discipline: Scholarly Journals and the Post-World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition (2000).

Editorial Reviews

"The Norton Field Guide is one of the best rhetorics I’ve seen at achieving essential coverage and brevity. It gives guidance to new instructors and flexibility to others. …The readings are great."

Nedra Reynolds

"The beauty of the Field Guide is that it can conform to any style of teaching and appeal to any pedagogical approach."

Tony Procell

"The level of detail is perfect. …It leaves room for the instructor to move about to add material, to pitch the content in his or her particular way. Writers, even student writers, want advice, not directives. In years of reviewing, I have seen few books that offer something new and valuable and interesting. The Norton Field Guide is one. The innovation it offers is long overdue."

Paul Heilker

"The Norton Field Guide to Writing, with readings can be used in a variety of ways, depending on each individual teacher’s style and focus. The apparatus is well-designed, especially the detailed focus on genres, and each chapter includes effective sample writing."

Allison Smith

"This book nails the rhetoric, and the readings have enough variety in them to support multiple approaches for instruction."

Joanna Clark

"I would highly recommend the book to anyone new to the freshman composition classroom."

DaRelle Rollins

"The amount of detail is perfect. Students will find this book easy to understand—and will appreciate not being overloaded with information."

Mitzi Walker Jones

"The selection of longer, shorter, expository, and researched essays makes the book a useful teaching tool. The readings are bound by a common creativity that will inspire students to make more daring approaches to their writing."

Christopher Harris