The What, Why, and How of Academic Writing: From Inspiration to Investigation to Implementation, Preliminary Edition

As college level instructors know, everyone arrives to campus at a different level of proficiency and with different skillsets. No matter our pedagogical approaches, they will all leave our courses with differing levels as well. So, among the first orders of business is to provide for every level of entry, every level of English language skills, and most of all, help scholars recognize the real significance of the life changing (and world changing) journey they are embarking upon.

The What, Why and How of Academic Writing is a holistic roadmap to helping new college scholars find themselves as part of the hallowed higher educational institutions where we teach. The book begins with an entrance guide of sorts, focusing on the changes from the (frequent) K-12 approach to memorizing and purging on weekly tests, to deeper and richer  learning approaches more abundantly offered here in college. This book includes guidance on What differences scholars should expect and embrace, Why these differences will improve their learning and long-term retention and How to make the transition to a more rigorous and rewarding learning experience. 

This textbook is largely based on the practice of Inquiry Based Learning (IBL). This begins by inciting wonder and curiosity in scholars to promote intrinsic motivation. That motivation will drive their development of a Driving Research Question that they will spend the better part of a semester trying to answer. In pursuit of that answer, they will invest the balance of the semester researching, critically thinking, reading and writing about their chosen topic and focus. At the same time, the textbook will offer new college level writing strategies to make the writing easier to produce, which in turn makes writing more effective and rich, and robust. It is ultimately the scholars' agency and choice that makes IBL work so well. The result is a cadre of scholars who leave your course knowing What it means to build great college papers, essays and other works in their chosen careers, Why their writing matters (at many levels), and How to engage others to join them in their work to create a better world for us all.