This title explains how to read, interpret and write about the world around us in a critical and informed way. How well are you able to decode the signs that surround us in our daily lives? All of us, consciously or unconsciously, are constantly engaged in the act of reading and interpreting the signs in the world around us. This book answers the needs of students of composition, rhetoric, creative writing, stylistics or literature: it provides a process orientated guide to analyzing anything. Fraser and Davidson teach the reader how to perform semiotic analysis and formulate in plain language a logical set of instructions on how to write it up. The central idea is that analytical writing can be performed on any kind of text. The authors move from theory to practical analysis, featuring sidebars throughout that expand on relevant points. There is a clear trajectory through research, planning and writing with concrete revision strategies. The book includes links to insightful and witty readings on its expansive Companion Website, together with a Lecturer Handbook, extra material and additional essay tasks. This is the textbook of choice for all students of writing.

Twenty-seven years in the making, Terra Cognita chronicles the author's continual travels-and problematic (if still, at times, ecstatic) encounters-in the "bel paese." Across nine richly evocative essays, Chad Davidson investigates the seemingly never-ending fascination that travelers have with Italy. As much a meditation on what home and away mean as it is a travel memoir, Terra Cognita finds literary predecessors such as Dante and Italo Calvino crowding in alongside more accustomed sights from travel shows, Hollywood films, and tourist guides. Though each essay departs from a particular location in Italy and remains rooted in the author's own history there, the book ultimately becomes less about those places and more about the placelessness any such journey can engender, how-even after flying across an ocean and landing in a foreign country-we are still hopelessly and fully ourselves.

This title explains how to read, interpret and write about the world around us in a critical and informed way. How well are you able to decode the signs that surround us in our daily lives? All of us, consciously or unconsciously, are constantly engaged in the act of reading and interpreting the signs in the world around us. This book answers the needs of students of composition, rhetoric, creative writing, stylistics or literature: it provides a process orientated guide to analyzing anything. Fraser and Davidson teach the reader how to perform semiotic analysis and formulate in plain language a logical set of instructions on how to write it up. The central idea is that analytical writing can be performed on any kind of text. The authors move from theory to practical analysis, featuring sidebars throughout that expand on relevant points. There is a clear trajectory through research, planning and writing with concrete revision strategies. The book includes links to insightful and witty readings on its expansive Companion Website, together with a Lecturer Handbook, extra material and additional essay tasks. This is the textbook of choice for all students of writing.