The Writing Skill Builder for College Freshmen

Book excerpt: The Writing Skill Builder for College Freshmen is a one-of-a-kind hands-on student's companion to better collegiate writing. In comparison to other rhetorical pedagogy, it is a reader-friendly helper that targets specific weak areas of writing to help alleviate the frustration that a number of students encounter in college writing. It is specifically written to help learners who prefer a simpler book to improve their writing. Furthermore, the exercises provide a sense of familiarity to ensure immediate connection with phrasings. Brief lectures are included before each set and accompanied by a questioning approach to foster better understanding in correcting repetitive, fundamental errors crucial to success in academic writing. The passages included are selected with care not only to accommodate practice but also to teach valuable lessons in writing clearly to connect to real-world experience. To be also teacher-friendly, a few essay assignments are linked to certain exercises to correlate with Composition 101 course requirements. Workbook Features: - Targeted coverage of specific areas of weakness that are troublesome for students such as fragments, cliché comma splices, run-on sentences, noun-pronoun parallels, trite expressions, particular areas of grammar, etc. - Minimal lecture with clear examples and explanations preceding each section - A wide range of brief exercises with interesting assignments - Answer keys with suggested revisions for all exercises - On-the-spot A to Z access to informal words in standardized dictionaries that should be avoided in formal writing in and out of college - An A to Z list of formal words and terminologies often misused - A complement of present tense synonym replacements for "say" in alphabetical order to improve repertoire of words for more advanced usages, especially in literary and research essays - Works Cited page in Modern Language Association format with 2009 updates - A light-weight text that teachers will enjoy, too Joy F. Beckford is an English teacher who writes from years of experience teaching in Caribbean and American classrooms. She is also a Sigma Tau Delta scholar with a Master's degree in English from State University of New York College at Brockport. Her forte is helping students become more comfortable with writing as they develop mastery of writing skills. Her passion and love for English are further reflected in another workbook entitled Grade Nine Achievement Tests in English, which challenges high school students to prepare for college-level work. She has taught at all levels, including Monroe Community College in New York, and now teaches at Palm Beach State College in Florida.