Entering the Academic Conversation


Book Description

Entering the Academic Conversation (not final) is a brief guide for doing research and academic writing in college, which welcomes students into the exchange of scholarly ideas within academic communities across the disciplines.




Academic Conversations


Book Description

Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.




They Say


Book Description




A Jane Austen Education


Book Description

An eloquent memoir of a young man's life transformed by literature. In A Jane Austen Education, Austen scholar William Deresiewicz turns to the author's novels to reveal the remarkable life lessons hidden within. With humor and candor, Deresiewicz employs his own experiences to demonstrate the enduring power of Austen's teachings. Progressing from his days as an immature student to a happily married man, Deresiewicz's A Jane Austen Education is the story of one man's discovery of the world outside himself. A self-styled intellectual rebel dedicated to writers such as James Joyce and Joseph Conrad, Deresiewicz never thought Austen's novels would have anything to offer him. But when he was assigned to read Emma as a graduate student at Columbia, something extraordinary happened. Austen's devotion to the everyday, and her belief in the value of ordinary lives, ignited something in Deresiewicz. He began viewing the world through Austen's eyes and treating those around him as generously as Austen treated her characters. Along the way, Deresiewicz was amazed to discover that the people in his life developed the depth and richness of literary characters-that his own life had suddenly acquired all the fascination of a novel. His real education had finally begun. Weaving his own story-and Austen's-around the ones her novels tell, Deresiewicz shows how her books are both about education and themselves an education. Her heroines learn about friendship and feeling, staying young and being good, and, of course, love. As they grow up, they learn lessons that are imparted to Austen's reader, who learns and grows by their sides. A Jane Austen Education is a testament to the transformative power of literature, a celebration of Austen's mastery, and a joy to read. Whether for a newcomer to Austen or a lifelong devotee, Deresiewicz brings fresh insights to the novelist and her beloved works. Ultimately, Austen's world becomes indelibly entwined with our own, showing the relevance of her message and the triumph of her vision.




Style and Substance


Book Description

Style and Substance demystifies “academic conversations” by breaking down the underlying concepts behind good scholarship and the skills involved in research, writing, and presenting. The author guides post-secondary students through the trials of academic writing, from how to form fruitful research questions, to gathering and using the appropriate evidence, and finally, to crafting polished, thoughtful responses to the questions that we pose ourselves in good research. Throughout, the author demonstrates how to engage in each step of this process, and shows how doing so thoughtfully and deliberately is in fact how one joins the academic conversations at the heart of all post-secondary education.




Academic Conversations


Book Description

Where would we be without conversation? Throughout history, conversations have allowed us to see different perspectives, build ideas, and solve problems. Conversations, particularly those referred to in this book as academic conversations, push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. Unfortunately, academic conversations are rare in many classrooms. Talk is often dominated by the teacher and a few students, or it does not advance beyond short responses to the teacher's questions. Even certain teaching approaches and curriculum programs neglect to train students how to maintain a focused, respectful, and thoughtful conversation. To address these challenges, authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford have identified five core communication skills to help students hold productive academic conversations across content areas. These skills include: elaborating and clarifying, supporting ideas with evidence, building on and/or challenging ideas, paraphrasing, and synthesizing. This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing Complex and abstract essential understandings in content areas such as adaptation, human nature, bias, conservation of mass, energy, gravity, irony, democracy, greed, and more An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.




"They Say


Book Description

THIS TITLE HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE 2016 MLA UPDATE. The New York Times best-selling book on academic writing--in use at more than 1,500 schools.




Writing the Successful Thesis and Dissertation


Book Description

A complete, step-by-step, practical overview of the process of writing successful theses and dissertations Every year thousands of graduate students face the daunting–sometimes terrifying– challenge of writing a thesis or dissertation. But most of them have received little or no instruction on doing it well. This book shows them how in ways no other book does. It combines the practical guidance and theoretical understanding students need to complete their theses or dissertations with maximum insight and minimum stress. Drawing on her extensive research and experience advising hundreds of graduate students, Dr. Irene Clark presents a solid overview of the writing process. Clark shows how to apply innovative theories of process and genre and understand the writing process for what it is: your entrance into a conversation with the scholarly community that will determine your success or failure. This book offers useful strategies for each phase of the process, from choosing advisors and identifying topics through writing, revision, and review. Coverage includes • Getting started: overcoming procrastination and writer’s block • Understanding the genre of the thesis or dissertation • Speaking the “language of the academy” • Writing compelling proposals • Developing and revising drafts • Constructing effective literature reviews • Working with tables, graphs, and other visual materials • Working with advisors and dissertation committees • Avoiding inadvertent plagiarism Experience based, theoretically grounded, jargon free, and practical, Writing the Successful Thesis and Dissertation will help you become a more effective writer–and a more meaningful contributor to the scholarly conversation. Preface xi Introduction: Writing a Thesis or Dissertation: An Overview of the Process xix Chapter 1: Getting Started 1 Chapter 2: So What? Discovering Possibilities 17 Chapter 3: The Proposal as an Argument: A Genre Approach to the Proposal 33 Chapter 4: Mapping Texts: The Reading/Writing Connection 63 Chapter 5: Writing and Revising 83 Chapter 6: Writing the Literature Review 103 Chapter 7: Using Visual Materials 125 Chapter 8: The Advisor and Thesis/Dissertation Committee 139 Chapter 9: Working with Grammar and Style 155 Chapter 10: Practical Considerations 175 Index: 193




Joining the Conversation


Book Description

With the success of The Bedford Researcher, Mike Palmquist has earned a devoted following of teachers and students who appreciate his accessible approach to the process of inquiry-based writing. Now he brings his proven methodology and friendly tone to Joining the Conversation. While students may know how to send text messages, search for images, and read the news online all at the same time, they don’t necessarily know how to juggle the skills they need to engage readers and compose a meaningful contribution to an academic conversation. Meeting students where they are — working online and collaboratively — Joining the Conversation embraces the new realities of writing, without sacrificing the support that students need as they write for college and beyond.




Clueless in Academe


Book Description

Gerald Graff argues that our schools and colleges make the intellectual life seem more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than it is or needs to be. Left clueless in the academic world, many students view the life of the mind as a secret society for which only an elite few qualify. In a refreshing departure from standard diatribes against academia, Graff shows how academic unintelligibility is unwittingly reinforced not only by academic jargon and obscure writing, but by the disconnection of the curriculum and the failure to exploit the many connections between academia and popular culture. Finally, Graff offers a wealth of practical suggestions for making the culture of ideas and arguments more accessible to students, showing how students can enter the public debates that permeate their lives.