Learning Japanese "kana" is no problem when you practice, practice, practice

Grasp the art of expressing yourself in written Japanese with "Practice Makes Perfect: Writing Japanese Kana." Perfect for intermediate to advanced learners of Japanese, this workbook leads you step-by-step through the complexities of writing hiragana and katakana characters. You work at your own pace so you gain confidence and become comfortable with this skill as you progress through the book.

You will get plenty of practice, practice, practice using proper techniques for writing Japanese characters, words, and sentences, enhancing your language-learning experience.

"Practice Makes Perfect: Writing Japanese Kana" is packed with: Clear and easy-to-understand examples that illustrate how to write hiragana and katakana characters Hundreds of exercises to build and flex your writing skills A unique writing grid to help you improve your handwriting as you practice the characters

In Your Life As Story, autobiography expert Tristine Rainer explains how we can all find the important messages in our lives. Like Mary Karr or Frank McCourt, we can shape those stories into dramatic narratives that are compelling to others. Blending literary scholarship with practical coaching, Rainer shares her remarkable techniques for finding the essentials of story structure within your life?s scattered experiences. Most important, she explains how to treasure the struggles in your past and discover the meaning within those experiences to capture the unique myth at work in your life.

What can teachers in British and American inner-city schools learn from each other about literacy training? To explore this question, Sarah Warshauer Freedman and her British colleagues set up a writing exchange that matched classes from four middle and high schools in the San Francisco Bay area with their London equivalents.

"Exchanging Writing, Exchanging Cultures" offers concrete lessons to school reformers, policymakers, and classroom teachers about the value and effectiveness of different approaches to teaching writing. Freedman goes beyond the specific subject matter of this study, looking anew at Vygotsky's and Bakhtin's theories of social interaction and addressing the larger questions of the relationship between culture and education.

This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers' testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.

Educators, academics, or business persons will find this book convenient and irreplaceable--a must to have on hand, whether writing for the first time or after years of experience. Arthur Asa Berger's guidelines and suggestions are suitable for all types of written work. . . . The entire book is a good example of practicing what you preach in that he writes with style, economy, and purpose. Read and apply Berger's writing skill techniques to enhance the effectiveness of your next writing project. --Canadian Home Economics Journal When academics speak of their writing, they are almost always referring to their books and articles. Yet, in their scholarly career, more time and effort will be spent on business correspondence--memos, letters, reports, proposals--than the items that appear on a vita. And, in most cases, no training is ever provided about how to effectively produce and present these kinds of documents. Arthur Asa Berger's brief, practical guide does just that, taking the reader through the most common kinds of business correspondence that a university professor is required to produce and offering useful advice to make these communications as effective as possible. He covers important genres such as letters of recommendation, tenure, letters, and grant proposals. In the second half of the book, Berger offers general suggestions on effective writing--brainstorming and collaborating, persuasion, outlining and revising, designing documents, avoiding writer's block, and using computers, among other topics. Just as the quality of your published pieces affects your career, so can the quality of your correspondence help or hinder academic success. Improving Writing Skills demystifies and guides you through this process.

Tracing the growth of ancient biography from the fifth century to the first century B.C., Arnaldo Momigliano asks fruitful questions about the origins and development of Greek biography. By clarifying the social and intellectual implications of the fact that the Greeks kept biography and autobiography distinct from historiography, he contributes to an understanding of a basic dichotomy in the Western tradition of historical writing. The Development of Greek Biography is fully annotated, and includes a bibliography designed to serve as an introduction to the study of biography in general. This classic study is now reissued with the addition of Momigliano's essay "Second Thoughts on Greek Biography" (1971).

Ideal for anyone interested in writing short stories or for introductory courses in fiction writing, A Short Story Writer's Companion is a highly accessible guide to the craft of creating short fiction. Written in an engaging style, this book enables beginning writers to recognize what works in writing short stories, what doesn't, and why. Part One of A Short Story Writer's Companion discusses fictional truth and significant detail, helping students of the form to make good sense of the often taught creative writing maxim, "Show, don't tell!" Part Two delves into the elements of fiction: character, point of view, plot, setting and time, metaphor, and voice. The author uses specific examples from a variety of widely anthologized short stories to demonstrate how each component functions as a part of the whole and offers advice on the techniques of using each of the elements successfully. Part Three closely examines the fiction-writing process and helps guide writers who may never have written a short story before through drafting, revising, and polishing short stories of their own.

In the tradition of Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird," a critically acclaimed National Book Award finalist shares inspiration and practical advice for writing a memoir.
Writing memoir is a deeply personal, and consequential, undertaking. As the acclaimed author of five memoirs spanning significant turning points in her life, Beth Kephart has been both blessed and bruised by the genre. In "Handling the Truth," she thinks out loud about the form--on how it gets made, on what it means to make it, on the searing language of truth, on the thin line between remembering and imagining, and, finally, on the rights of memoirists. Drawing on proven writing lessons and classic examples, on the work of her students and on her own memories of weather, landscape, color, and love, Kephart probes the wrenching and essential questions that lie at the heart of memoir.
A beautifully written work in its own right, "Handling the Truth" is Kephart's memoir-writing guide for those who read or seek to write the truth.

Built around practical exercises, this book helps students to practise and master core reading and writing skills crucial to the successful study of philosophy. "The Philosophy Skills Book" will help you to master the core skills you need to succeed in your study of Philosophy. Taking you through a series of exercises that will help you practise and perfect your reading and writing of Philosophy, this book covers such topics as: Finding arguments and drawing conclusions; Finding and resolving inconsistencies; Brainstorming and planning your essays; Summarizing and defending your argument; Using quotations; and, Avoiding common errors. Whether you want to get your studies off to a flying start or improve your final grade, "The Philosophy Skills Book" will help you develop the skills you need to be a better Philosopher.

Conversations in Context: Identity, Knowledge, and College Writing invites students to learn about and participate in a series of related conversations about student identities, the aims of the university, and the conventions of academic writing. Rather than seeing academic writing as consisting of objective statements of "truth," the editors of this textbook view it as a social construction of knowledge that requires rhetorical choices as well as empirical research. This book represents academic writing as a sequence of continuing conversations within discourse communities provides a variety of oppotunities to engage with and participate in these converstaions.

Developed specifically for today's composition classroom, THE WRITER?S WORKPLACE is a resource for instructors who want the greatest flexibility as they design their college writing courses. The text provides a wealth of material that allows for different teaching methods as well as different learning styles.

Read, Reason, Write unites instruction in critical reading and analysis, argument, and research strategies with a rich collection of readings that provide both practice for these skills and new ideas and insights for readers.

Through all of its years, this text has been committed to showing students how reading, analytic, argumentative, and research skills are interrelated and how these skills combine to develop each student's critical thinking ability.

Essential reading for diploma, degree and postgraduate taught-course students, this is an accessible and comprehensive guide to the process of completing projects, extended reports, dissertations and theses on business and management topics. Combining an extensive review of basic research methods and techniques with guidelines on the management of the dissertation writing process, the authors cover issues from the selection of topics to the research, preparation, structuring and presentation of a dissertation.

The "Blueprints" academic writing series offers a unique combination of instruction in the rhetorical processes, while focusing on paraphrasing, summarizing, and synthesizing. This dual focus helps students develop good writing habits and avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism. Additional Writing Assignments from Academic Disciplines allows them to practice their new skills on the types of writing tasks they will face outside the ESL classroom.

Written by an experienced, well-respected author in this field, this book provides vital guidelines on writing essays and journal articles for more experienced practitioners. It gives advice on the most appropriate form of written communication for different circumstances, and practical exercises throughout ensure the reader can apply theory to practice.