Sean Ingrams style reminds me of The Palmwine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola, one of the pioneers of African literature in Anglophone West Africa. His very witty use of symbolism is reminiscent of Beaudelaires Albatros and Les Fleurs Du Mal (Flowers of Evil). In fact, this collection challenges conventional thinking and writing, with its lexicon and syntax interestingly provocativeto put it mildly. Seans book, I strongly believe, must be carefully taken and read for what it truly is: A Beautiful Piece of Art! Dr. Dsir Baloubi, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English & Linguistics, Department of Humanities, Shaw University

Titled De rerum natura in Latin, On the Nature of Things, written by Titus Lucretius Carus and translated by John Selby Watson, is an epic poem and philosophical essay in one. Written with the intent of explaining Epicurean philosophy to the Romans, the original poem was divided into six books and written in dactylic hexameter. The overarching principle in the book explains the human role in a universe ruled by chance. Notable is the absence of the gods the Romans depended upon; though LUCRETIUS invokes the goddess Venus in the poem's opening lines, he uses her merely as an allegory for sexual and reproductive power. Other themes throughout the poem include the nature of the soul and mind, why we sense and feel and think, principles of the void and atomism, the creation and evolution of the world, and celestial and terrestrial phenomena (and their differences). It tries to explain human life and purpose in a nutshell, or the nature of the Universe--a way for people to cope and understand in a confused and terrifying world. TITUS LUCRETIUS CARUS (c. 99 BC - 55 Be was a Roman philosopher and poet. Very little is known about his life, and his only known work is the epic poem on Epicurean philosophy, On the Nature of Things. He dedicated the work to the famous Roman orator and poet Gaius Memmius, who may have been a friend, and it is thought that he may have died before he finished editing the poem, as it ends rather abruptly. The book's translator, JOHN SELBY WATSON (1804-1884), was a British translator and writer, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering his wife in 1872.

"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, cliche 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.

When we write, we also engage in conversations with other writers. The writers are expressing ideas, sharing opinions, working through problems, agreeing, and disagreeing. The writers of Why White Rice? embrace this idea fully but also move past just saying it: they demonstrate it through a book that is a conversation on writing---distinct and honest voices contending with one another, responding to each other, and working through problems. This book on writing comes from four community college teachers with different backgrounds and training (with contributions from students, as well) in a collection of voices that speaks directly to students and writers. It drops the pretense of traditional textbooks and talks honestly with students in a way that has them reading and responding in some surprising ways. Reading this book is like sitting down with that teacher who cared enough to tell it to you straight---to be honest with you. Even if it stung a little, you knew she was right and you listened. About the Authors The book features four authors---all community college teachers, all writers, but each with different training and backgrounds. Eric DeVillez holds an MFA in creative writing from Roosevelt University, Tom Dow has a PhD in literature from Loyola University, Michael McGuire holds an MA in rhetoric and composition from Northeastern Illinois University, and Troy Swanson holds a PhD in community college leadership from Old Dominion University and holds a Masters of Library and Information Science from Dominican University. This blend of academic training and experience brings very different (and often competing) perspectives on writing, which adds to the lively conversation of the book itself. Pedagogy The book teaches by example. It models effective writing in a variety of ways while addressing the subject of writing itself. It models writing and research, quite literally, through a conversation of ideas. The text also features chapter summaries, focus boxes to highlight key points, and a comprehensive index to make it easy for readers to locate typical (and less typical) topics in writing as they are addressed throughout the conversation of the text. The book can be read in sequence from beginning to end, by chapter (in any order), or by writing topic as located through the table of contents and index. The brief response pieces are quite effective for classroom teaching as they seem to predict many questions, comments, and challenges raised by students. These response pieces are short enough to read in the classroom and offer a springboard to rich conversation.

Fasten your seat belt for a crash course in careful usage.... Just like automobile accidents, accidents of style occur all over the English-speaking world, in print and on the Internet, thousands of times every day. They range from minor fender benders, such as confusing" their" and "there, " to serious smashups, such as misusing "sensual" for "sensuous" or writing "loathe "when you mean "loath."

Charles Harrington Elster shows you how to navigate the hairpin turns of grammar, diction, spelling, and punctuation with an entertaining driver's manual covering 350 common word hazards and infractions, arranged in order of complexity for writers of all levels. Elster illustrates these surprisingly common accidents with quotations from numerous print and online publications, many of them highly regarded---which perhaps should make us feel better: If the horrendous redundancy "close""proximity" and the odious construction "what it is, is" have appeared in "The New York Times, " maybe our own accidents will be forgiven. But that shouldn't keep us from aspiring to accident-free writing and speaking.

If you want to get on the road to writing well, "The Accidents of Style" will help you drive home what you want to say.

Available now for the first time in paperback, COMMUNICATING SCIENCE: THE SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE FROM THE 17TH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT elaborates the emergence of the scientific article from its beginnings to the present. Gross, Harmon, and Reidy analyze numerous sample texts in French, English, and German, focusing on the changes in the style, organization, and argumentative structure of scientific communication over time. The authors also speculate on the currency and influence of the scientific article in the digital age. COMMUNICATING SCIENCE: THE SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE FROM THE 17TH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT has been an invaluable resource text in the rhetoric of science and stands as the definitive study on the topic. " COMMUNICATING SCIENCE] offers a moment of coalescence in the rhetoric of science as a model of rigorous research, not likely to be duplicated soon. It will be a staple introductory text in science studies courses and a stimulant for better scholarship in the field." -Jeanne Fahnestock, RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY "Communicating Science is a substantial contribution to the literature mapping out the changing language and rhetoric of the scientific article from 1665 to the present." -Charles Bazerman, ISIS "Gross, Harmon, and Reidy have set a new and higher standard for methodological and presentational rigor in scientific communication content analysis." ��-Kathryn Northcut, JOURNAL OF TECHNICAL WRITING AND COMMUNICATION "Gross, Harmon, and Reidy's decision to emphasize depth over breadth is characteristic of groundbreaking scholarship." -Suzanne Black, JOURNAL OF BUSINESS AND TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION "Communicating Science is a marvel of scholarship and expression and deserves to be in the curriculum of every university's rhetoric department." -Tim Whalen, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION "The book will be an essential starting point for future discussion of the history of scientific writing." -John Turney, DIVERSITY AND DISTRIBUTIONS "A book to buy, to read, and to think about." -A. J. (Tom) van Loon, EUROPEAN SCIENCE EDITING

This anthology includes 19 essays about writing fiction, drama, nonfiction, and poetry, and on translation, editing, and many related topics, by Ardath Mayhar, Victor J. Banis, Charles Allen Gramlich, W. C. Bamberger, Charles Nuetzel, Robert Reginald, Y. Du Bois Irvin, Elliott D. Hammer, Damien Broderick, Michael R. Collings, Brian Stableford, John Howard Weeks, William Maltese, Francis Jarman, and Frank J. Morlock.

The Watcher: Poems is the first collection of poetry from Agnes Eva Savich. In it you will find themes of urban alienation, mortality, love, motherhood, sensual eroticism, psychedelic journey & synaesthesia, music, and much more. The author states: "Welcome to my world, I hope you find some of your world in it."

A book by G. K. Chesterton detailing a popular theme both in his own philosophy, and in Christianity, of the 'holy fool', such as in Dostoevsky's The Idiot and Cervantes' Don Quixote. This is a book in two parts. The first, "The Enigma of Innocent Smith," concerns the arrival of a new tenant at Beacon House, a London boarding establishment. Like Mary Poppins, this man (who is tentatively identified by lodger Arthur Inglewood as an ex-schoolmate named Innocent Smith) is accompanied by a great wind, and he breathes new life into the household with his games and antics. During his first day in residence the eccentric Smith creates the High Court of Beacon; arranges to elope with Mary Gray, paid companion to heiress Rosamund Hunt; inspires Inglewood to declare his love for Diana Duke, the landlady's daughter; and prompts a reconciliation between jaded journalist Michael Moon and Rosamund. However, when the household is at its happiest two doctors appear with awful news: Smith is wanted on charges of burglary, desertion of a spouse, polygamy, and attempted murder. The fact that Smith almost immediately fires several shots from a revolver at Inglewood's friend Dr. Herbert Warner seems to confirm the worst. Before Smith can be taken to a jail or an asylum, Michael Moon declares that the case falls under the purview of the High Court of Beacon and suggests that the household investigate the matter before involving the authorities or the press. The second part, "The Explanations of Innocent Smith," follows the trial. The prosecution consists of Moses Gould, a merrily cynical Jew who lives at Beacon House and considers Smith at best a fool and at worst a scoundrel, and Dr. Cyrus Pym, an American criminal specialist called in by Dr. Warner; Michael Moon and Arthur Inglewood act for the defense. The evidence consists of correspondence from people who witnessed or participated in the exploits that led to the charges against Smith. In every case, the defendant is revealed to be, as his first name states, innocent. He fires bullets near people to make them value life; the house he breaks into is his own; he travels around the world only to return with renewed appreciation for his house and family; and the women he absconded with are actually his wife Mary, posing as a spinster under different aliases so they may repeatedly re-enact their courtship. Smith is, needless to say, acquitted on all charges. Movie adaptation Dale Ahlquist (president of the American Chesterton Society and host of the EWTN series, G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense) is the executive producer of a motion picture version of Manalive. In 2006 he teamed up with screenwriter/producer/director, Joey Odendahl. They eventually formed Moonhunt Productions, and Manalive is to be their first feature. It will star Mark Shea as Innocent Smith and Kevin O'Brian as Professor Eames. As of 2009, the movie has completed filming and is in the post-production phase. (Wikipedia)

Gene Minshall was born in Saco in the northeastern quadrant of Montana, a place that National Geographic has defined as "The Last Real America." Minshall claims that his birth home gave him an untainted perspective of the different cultures he would encounter and the business communities in which he would eventually live and work. After service in the Navy and a degree from the University of Montana, Minshall worked in television stations in Montana and Washington State, before ultimately landing at KSL-TV in Salt Lake City, Utah. Serving as a reporter and producer as well as the writer and director of a score of documentaries exploring issues and interests of the day, he eventually became the news director of a rival station. There he directed the daily flow of information and worked with media consultants and management to increase ratings and viewer interest. Minshall is now an independent producer of highly acclaimed corporate videos and documentaries examining public issues and concerns. He is an honored Knight's Fellow for the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C., and has accepted several lead foreign assignments. Because of his work with political and communication leaders Minshall was asked by the State Department to work with Third World media centers in order to help them be respectful and responsive to a public anxious to receive news without bias and propaganda. Minshall's goal is to help close the gap between what TV stations are promoting and what exactly is presented to their viewers. He laments media practices that work against fully informing the public and yet is the first to recognize the incredible contributions progressive news departments havemade. He admits his bias is in favor of the viewers and is anxious to have them receive news that is beyond the hand of management and consultants and more in tune with the nature and competent side of journalist. Gene hopes that his ideas as stated in this text may become a catalyst to encourage news departments to develop a guiding philosophy about their work and public obligations.

Women, Writing, and Soul-Making: Creativity and the Sacred Feminine moves the reader to quiet depths, affirming what it is to embody and then write down one's truth. At once informative and inspirational, the book reveals its wisdom in layers, inviting the reader to return to it again and again. Millin delivers the profound message that women have access to a feminine approach to writing, one that differs from what they have been taught. When employed, this approach frees them from the fears and "shoulds" that have restrained their creativity. Although written primarily about the feminine and a woman's journey, men and women alike will find the book a guide to writing as a journey of the soul.

While the grading of student writing is of central concern to composition studies and to teaching, the process has not been clearly defined. The act of assigning a grade raises such issues as how teachers read student writing, whether form and content are of equal concern, what the purpose of grading is, and whether grading should take place at all. The vagueness of grading points to the complexity of the topic, which encompasses such matters as student peer review, psychometrics, student-teacher conferences, portfolios, collaborative learning, and English-as-a-Second-Language. Because of the centrality of grading and its complexity, the topic has generated a large body of literature. This reference book is a helpful guide to the vast and sometimes bewildering body of research on the grading of student writing. The volume includes entries for more than 1300 books and articles on grading published between 1970 and 1996. Each entry includes an annotation that summarizes the work and its importance. The entries are grouped in several broad chapters, with most chapters containing numerous subsections. Thus the book covers such topics as holistic grading, portfolio assessment, collaborative approaches to assessment, essay tests, creative writing, whole language, standardized tests, and student progress. The entries are arranged alphabetically within each subsection, and the author and subject indexes allow the user to access information quickly.

Winner of the MLA's Mina P. Shaugnessy Prize for an outstanding work in the fields of language, culture, literacy, or literature with strong application to the teaching of English.

Focusing largely on the controversial website Wikipedia, the author explores the challenges confronting teachers of college writing in the increasingly electronic and networked writing environments their students use every day. Rather than praising or condemning that site for its role as an encyclopedia, Cummings instead sees it as a site for online collaboration between writers and a way to garner audience for student writing.

Applying an understanding of Commons-Based Peer Production theory, as developed by Yochai Benkler, this text is arranged around the following propositions:

-- Commons-Based Peer Production is a novel economic phenomenon which informs our current teaching model and describes a method for making sense of future electronic developments.

-- College writers are motivated to do their best work when they write for an authentic audience, external to the class.

-- Writing for a networked knowledge community invites students to participate in making knowledge, rather than only consuming it.

-- A plan for integrating networked writing for an external audience helps students understand the transition from high school to college writing.

-- Allowing students to review and self-select points of entry into electronic discourse fosters "laziness," or a new work dynamic where writers seek to better understand their own creativity in terms of a project's demands.

"Lazy Virtues" offers networked writing assignments to foster development of student writers by exposing them to the demands of professional audiences, asking them to identify and assess their own creative impulses in terms of a project's needs, and removing the writing teacher from the role of sole audience.

Winner of the MLA's Mina P. Shaugnessy Prize for an outstanding work in the fields of language, culture, literacy, or literature with strong application to the teaching of English.

Focusing largely on the controversial website Wikipedia, the author explores the challenges confronting teachers of college writing in the increasingly electronic and networked writing environments their students use every day. Rather than praising or condemning that site for its role as an encyclopedia, Cummings instead sees it as a site for online collaboration between writers and a way to garner audience for student writing.

Applying an understanding of Commons-Based Peer Production theory, as developed by Yochai Benkler, this text is arranged around the following propositions:

-- Commons-Based Peer Production is a novel economic phenomenon which informs our current teaching model and describes a method for making sense of future electronic developments.

-- College writers are motivated to do their best work when they write for an authentic audience, external to the class.

-- Writing for a networked knowledge community invites students to participate in making knowledge, rather than only consuming it.

-- A plan for integrating networked writing for an external audience helps students understand the transition from high school to college writing.

-- Allowing students to review and self-select points of entry into electronic discourse fosters "laziness," or a new work dynamic where writers seek to better understand their own creativity in terms of a project's demands.

"Lazy Virtues" offers networked writing assignments to foster development of student writers by exposing them to the demands of professional audiences, asking them to identify and assess their own creative impulses in terms of a project's needs, and removing the writing teacher from the role of sole audience.

Chinese characters are written with "strokes" of a brush. The HanABC system has classified these different types of strokes using 24 Roman letters. Anyone who knows the proper stroke writing order of a character and the HanABC stroke classification system can write the "Romanization" of that character. Since the Roman alphabet has an established and well known order, HanABC has adopted this alphabetical order to sort Chinese information. This book includes the HanABC Romanizations for 14,515 Chinese characters. HanABC does not require a person to know the traditional radical, the number of strokes or the phonetics of a character. HanABC requires minimal rules, while still efficiently encoding the entirety of Chinese characters. HanABC facilitates quick and easy search in a sorted list. Thus, HanABC would be very well suited to sort dictionaries and telephone books, to index any book, or even for typing Chinese at a computer keyboard.

Selected pieces of the student literary magazine, Forum, have been assembled into this compilation - timeless stories ranging from such topics as racism to multiculturalism; from living with AIDS to dying from AIDS; from quantum physics to existentialism; from Esperanto to terrorism; from the respect for history to the fears of growing up; and from living with obsessive-compulsive disorder to dying from cancer. Readers will be hard-pressed to determine whether a story was written in 1986 or 2006. Therein lies the beauty of Lavender & Old Ladies: its content has a degree of timelessness.

At last--the contemporary masters of memoir have come together to reveal their strategies and impart their advice. This book contains an unprecedented wealth of knowledge in one place.

In "The Autobiographers Handbook," you're invited to a roundtable discussion with today's most successful memoirists. Let Nick Hornby show you how the banal can be brilliant. Elizabeth Gilbert will teach you to turn pain into prose. Want to beat procrastination? Steve Almond has the answer. Learn about memory triggers (Ishmael Beah: music) and warm-up exercises (Jonathan Ames: internet backgammon). These writers may not always agree (on research: Tobias Wolff, yes, Frank McCourt, no) but whether you're a blossoming writer or a veteran wordsmith, this book will help anyone who has ever dreamed of putting their story on paper, on writing themselves into existence.

Featuring: STEVE ALMOND - JONATHAN AMES - ISHMAEL BEAH - ELIZABETH GILBERT - NICK HORNBY - A. J. JACOBS - MAXINE HONG KINGSTON - PHILLIP LOPATE - FRANK MCCOURT - DAVID RAKOFF - ESMERALDA SANTIAGO - JULIA SCHEERES - ART SPIEGELMAN - ANTHONY SWOFFORD - SARAH VOWELL - SEAN WILSEY - TOBIAS WOLFF - AND MANY MORE

In these essays, Stevenson gives advice on a variety of subjects, ranging from inspiration and direction to the technical methods of writing. He explains the basic tools of word choice, rhythm in verse and prose, plotting, and style, with a discussion of the morality of writing--the potential for good that literature has, and the responsibility of the writer to wisely use that power. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 5.5-by-8.5-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

For the twice-published novelist, reading an article about herself in the "National Enquirer"--under the headline "Here's One for the Books: Cleaning Lady Is an Acclaimed Author"--was more than a shock. It was an inspiration.

In "A Broom of One's Own," Nancy Peacock, whose first novel was selected by the "New York Times" as a Notable Book of the Year, explores with warmth, wit, and candor what it means to be a writer. An encouragement to all hard-working artists, no matter how they make a living, Peacock's book provides valuable insights and advice on motivation, craft, and criticism while offering hilarious anecdotes about the houses she cleans.

"Criticism is itself an art." This is one of the singular arguments in what must be one of Oscar Wilde's most compelling critical dialogues ever published. The Critic as Artist explores Wilde's defense of criticism through sharp, witty dialogue and riveting, thoughtful arguments. This theoretical dialogue uses prime examples to discuss many elements, such as criticism as an art form, the true definition of a critic, criticism's value over art, and more. A special treasure for admirers of Wilde and a welcome addition to any bookshelf, The Critic as Artist exemplifies the playwright's witty look on the world and his true love of art. --- About the author: Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1854, Oscar Wilde went on to become a prominent playwright, poet, and novelist all throughout the late Victorian Age. His many accomplishments in the field of writing have earned him praise as one of the most successful authors and playwrights of his era and beyond. He died in Paris in 1900 at the age of 46.

"A Counter-History of Composition" contests the foundational disciplinary assumption that vitalism and contemporary rhetoric represent opposing, disconnected poles in the writing tradition. Vitalism has been historically linked to expressivism and concurrently dismissed as innate, intuitive, and unteachable, whereas rhetoric is seen as a rational, teachable method for producing argumentative texts. Counter to this, Byron Hawk identifies vitalism as the ground for producing rhetorical texts-the product of complex material relations rather than the product of chance. Through insightful historical analysis ranging from classical Greek rhetoric to contemporary complexity theory, Hawk defines three forms of vitalism (oppositional, investigative, and complex) and argues for their application in the environments where students write and think today.
Hawk proposes that complex vitalism will prove a useful tool in formulating post-dialectical pedagogies, most notably in the context of emerging digital media. He relates two specific examples of applying complex vitalism in the classroom and calls for the reexamination and reinvention of current self-limiting pedagogies to incorporate vitalism and complexity theory.

This book helps readers master essay writing for the ACT - fast! If ACT savvy is what you seek, this book is the resource you need. Learn the secrets, shortcuts, and strategies to succeed - with only minutes of effort a day. Lively and straight to the point, this study aid to the ACT Essay section, new for 2005, presents key principles and practical strategies that promote effective essay writing, practical test strategies that are lifesavers when you're under time restraints, and sample essays with insightful commentary on how to construct a high-scoring piece. It features essential strategies for effective essay writing. It provides sample essays with annotated comments and examiner marks. It contains bite-sized sections ideal for students who study in short doses.