Welcome, Instructors!

With so many writing textbook choices available to you, I’m pleased that you have decided to use this one. I wrote this text for myriad reasons, but here are a few:

• I believe in low- and no-cost educational materials, particularly for general education and introductory courses.
• I wanted a textbook that focused writing as intellectual work and that didn’t rely on modes or a list of genres, but I couldn’t find one.
• Over nearly 30 years of teaching writing, I have developed many exercises that my students tell me are helpful. I wanted to share those.

I would also like to share the open pedagogy assignment I used with the first full draft of this book. In that assignment, I asked teams of students to choose a section and make revisions, and you will find their contributions acknowledged in the sections they chose. While the assignment was not without glitches (and I will be revising it in the future), most of the students became invested in the revision work that they did. As one of them wrote, “I expected none of my criticisms to be taken seriously because I wasn’t at the same level as the writer of the book, but my feedback was actually appreciated.” I learned so much from them, lessons that I expect to continue applying to this project.

Most importantly, just as I hope students find this textbook useful, I hope you do as well.