Encouraging you to be an inventive thinker and writer, THE COMPOSITION OF EVERYDAY LIFE, Brief, connects the act of writing to your daily life. It helps you to uncover meaning, rethink the world around you and invent ideas. With more than 50 reading selections by both professional and student writers, this book is designed to help you develop focused and distinctive academic essays. It gives you great preparation for the reading and writing activities you'll encounter throughout your college experience and beyond.

Cursed by tenderhearted witches, saved by Nazarene healers, and haunted by brazen lunatics, the characters in "Field Notes for the Earthbound" yearn to escape the relentless horizon of northwestern Ohio.

John Mauk received his PhD from Bowling Green State University and teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Encouraging you to be an inventive thinker and writer, THE COMPOSITION OF EVERYDAY LIFE, Concise, connects the act of writing to your daily life. It helps you to uncover meaning, rethink the world around you and invent ideas. With 36 reading selections by both professional and student writers, this book is designed to help you develop focused and distinctive academic essays. It gives you great preparation for the reading and writing activities you'll encounter throughout your college experience and beyond.

Organized around common rhetorical situations that occur all around us, INVENTING ARGUMENTS shows you that argument is a living process, not a form to be modeled. Through the text's prominent focus on invention, you will learn to recognize the rhetorical elements of any argumentative situation and apply the tools of argument effectively in your own writing. The basic layers of argument are introduced in early chapters, with material arranged into increasingly sophisticated topics beginning with the most obvious or explicit layers (claims) and moving to more implied or "hidden" layers (assumptions, values, beliefs, ideology). By the time you finish Part I, you will have a thorough understanding of argument, which you can then apply not just to the invention projects in Chapters 7-12, but also to your writing for other college courses and beyond. This edition has been updated to reflect guidelines from the 2016 MLA HANDBOOK, Eighth Edition.