Take Charge of Your Writing--and Dazzle Your Instructors! It can be a challenge to achieve writing excellence, but it doesn't have to be mysterious, and it's definitely not impossible. With this book, you'll learn how to actively engage with a text, analyse it, draw informed conclusions, and then make solid claims about what you have observed. | A lot of students come to college thinking they'll never be good writers. They don't like writing, don't think they're good at it, and wish they didn't have to do it. But anyone can learn to write effectively and persuasively using the tools and techniques presented in Thinking on the Page. The approaches in this book come from years of experience working with?and learning from?students. Rather than forcing non-English majors to think more like English majors, this book teaches students of many disciplines to get their smart, interesting, complicated ideas on the page by using the way they see the world as a strength in their writing. This approach works with a wide range of students: It's suitable for math majors and nursing students, for painters and business contractors, for computer programmers and future psychologists?not to mention English majors. In short, these are great techniques for the most confident writers in the room?and for the countless students who walk into first-year writing or literature classes every fall thinking, ""I'm not a good writer."" Thinking on the Page breaks writing down into its component parts to show students that this process isn't so different from other difficult things they've learned to do. It puts students in charge of their writing and lets them see that there's no such thing as a ""bad writer""?just writers who haven't yet found the techniques that work for them. FEATURES ? 50 illustrations to enhance the techniques presented ? A foreword from a prominent essayist such as James Gleick, Simon Schama, Malcolm Gladwell, or Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Take Charge of Your Writing--and Dazzle Your Instructors! It can be a challenge to achieve writing excellence, but it doesn't have to be mysterious, and it's definitely not impossible. To present powerful ideas effectively in your college essays, you need to break away from rigid rules and structures and start thinking on the page. With this book, you'll learn how to actively engage with a text, analyse it, draw informed conclusions, and then make solid claims about what you have observed. Thinking on the Page will also help you: Think critically about what you're reading and draw questions and ideas directly from the text Approach your essay as a story rather than a formula Work through your ideas by graphing, listing, charting, and drawing Incorporate relevant outside research Edit your final essay and polish it to perfection Whether you're in college or high school, you need to communicate your ideas effectively through writing. Thinking on the Page provides innovative tools tailored to the way you learn and write, enabling you to produce thoughtful, analytical, and meaningful work, both in school and beyond.

Author Biography

Martha Schulman has been teaching writing, including developmental writing and English as a Second Language, for over a decade. She has served as a consultant to faculty on writing pedagogy at The Cooper Union. She has also taught writing to American-bound college students in China. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have been widely published. Gwen Hyman is the Director of the Center for Writing at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City. She is the author of Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (Ohio) and co-author, with Andrew Carmellini, of Urban Italian (Bloomsbury) and American Flavor (Ecco).