Exploring College Writing: Reading, Writing and Researching across the Curriculum is a rhetoric for first-year and sophomore composition courses that uses a constructivist, ethnographic approach to introducing students to academic reading, writing, and researching. This text will be especially useful to composition instructors who wish to provide students with both a general overview of academic discourse and an introduction to the purposes, audiences, and genres of writing across disciplines. This textbook works from the premise that the best way to initiate students to academic discourse is to have them explore academic literacies using an ethnographic, fieldwork approach to their own institution. Students are cast in the role of researchers, exploring their own experiences as college writers and investigating writing in General Education and in their prospective majors.
The book provides instructors and students sequences of engaging and exploratory Writing to LearnA" and Learn by DoingA" activities and formal, extended writing projects that ask students to interview professors, analyze writing assignments, and reflect on their own reading, writing, and researching processes and histories. These writing projects connect to students' interests, experiences, and goals and provide them with a sense of purpose and audience for writing.