Grassroots with Readings: The Writer's Workbook

by Susan Fawcett

Book Overview

A long-standing bestseller, Grassroots remains the preeminent worktext for developmental writers. With its excellent writing instruction, well-crafted and evenly paced exercises, and engaging writing... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618508538
• ISBN13: 9780618508532
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 8.6" x 10.9"

Customer Reviews

Writing for the people...

'Grassroots' by Susan Fawcett is the book we use at the community college where I work for some of our introductory reading courses. We also use this text in our Tutoring Center to help students get up to speed for exams, reading and writing in other courses (as almost every course on campus requires proficiency in reading and writing to a good degree). 'Grassroots' is in many ways a writing workshop in a book. It is not a creative writing text, but rather one that sets a firm foundation from which one can go on to creative writing, technical writing, business writing, website writing, and more. The first chapter explores the writing process - what is one writing for? Who is the likely or intended audience? How should a finished paper look? Believe it or not, it is on this last point that so many grades have risen or fallen - a paper can be wonderfully written, but if it is scribbled on scrap paper rather than typewritten and neatly printed, it may suffer in grading, just as a letter from a business will not be as well received if it has spelling errors and problems with formatting. The first major section looks at developing paragraphs, which is a basic building block of letters, stories, articles, essays and other kinds of writing. This includes brainstorming, freewriting, journaling, and outlining to make sure that ideas flow in a logical pattern. Units 2 - 8 are essentially grammar sections, looking at the mechanics of writing. This includes sentence structure (including avoiding sentence fragments), verbs, joining ideas together properly, being consistent across the sentences, dealing with punctuation (does that comma belong here?), and some spelling review. Unit 9 has a good selection of short readings that can be used to exemplify the issues presented earlier in the book. These include writing from well-known people such as Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Leo Buscaglia and others. The book is very colourful, with lots of user-friendly adaptations throughout the text. There are Writers' Workshop and Writing Assignments after each unit, and many Exploring Online sections, including links to many OWL sites (OWL is the acronym for Online Writing Labs). This text also has an appendix dedicated to ESL instruction, and there are pieces throughout the text that link to ESL instruction. One of the best parts of this text is the incorporation of humour. According to Fawcett, 'Humour is a fine instructional tool.' There are comics, classified-ad bloopers, short stories and jokes throughout the text that make the reading and writing experience more fun. This is a very good text.