Writing for a Lifetime Contemporary Readings from Popular Sources

Preface The caption says it all: Many students spend their elementary and even their high school years writing about topics such as what they did on their summer vacation. You have probably had at least one experience--probably many more than one--in which you were required to write about something that meant little or nothing to you. And no matter how good a writer you are, or how much you like writing, such topics can really make you dread writing. Hopefully, you were one of the lucky students who got to write about things that were important to you, and who got to use writing to discover things about yourself and your world. Be assured that whatever type of writing experiences you have had in the past,Writing for a Lifetimewill provide you with the opportunity to see how meaningful and rewarding the acts of reading and writing can be in your education, in your career, and in your life. Now that you are in college, the "what I did on my summer vacation" assignments are gone forever; instead, the topics you will be asked to write about will be more relevant, more intellectually stimulating, and more academically challenging than anything you have been asked to write about in the past.Writing for a Lifetime: Contemporary Readings from Popular Sourceswill help to prepare you for this type of writing. This textbook has been designed to help you develop your writing skills in three ways: (1) by providing you with published essays and articles that are well written, meaningful, and interesting; (2) by presenting prewriting assignments and other activities that will help you to discover and practice those actions and skills that are essential to good writing; and (3) by offering you a selection of writing topics that are not only meaningful and interesting but will help you to prepare for the type of writing that will be assigned in your college courses. This book is calledWriting for a Lifetime: Contemporary Readings from Popular Sourcesbecause the readings in each chapter deal with a topic that we have encountered or will encounter in our own lives--from childhood to old age--and everything in between, including adolescence, education, parenting, class and race in our society, careers, and relationships. These topics will help you to think about where you have been and where you are going; what you have done in the past and what you hope to do in the future; the people who have helped you get where you are and the people whom you will help as you become more independent and self-sufficient. In short, these topics will bring you through a "lifetime" of reading and writing--enabling you to use your own life experiences and knowledge to develop and build your writing skills. Each chapter of this book contains activities designed to guide you through a writing process that will help you to produce a finished product that will give you a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Each activity is defined and described below. Pre-reading Activity Each chapter begins with a pre-reading activity. You will be able to draw on your knowledge and experience as you write on a topic that is related to the readings and the writing assignments in the chapter. For example, Chapter 1 is about writing, so you will be asked to consider your own writing experiences: why you like or dislike writing, whether you are a "successful" writer, with whom you share your writing. This pre-reading activity will help you to make connections between your own experiences and the experiences of the professional writers whose essays and articles are presented in the chapter. Educational researchers have discovered that we can best learn new information and make the most sense of what we read when we are able to connect it with information that we already possess and with events that we have already experienced--and that is the process thMaher, Jane is the author of 'Writing for a Lifetime Contemporary Readings from Popular Sources', published 2000 under ISBN 9780136746645 and ISBN 0136746640.