Open-Access Textbooks

Try This: Research Methods for Writers

by Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Derek Mueller, and Kate Pantelides

<Try This explores interdisciplinary research methods employed in research in writing studies but rarely drawn upon in undergraduate courses. This shifts writing instruction from a model of knowledge delivery and solitary research to a pedagogy of knowledge-making and an acknowledgment of research writing as collective, overlapping, and distributed. Each chapter is organized around methods to approach a particular kind of primary data—texts, artifacts, places, and images. View this textbook ....

The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines

by Charles Bazerman

The Informed Writer, offered here in its fifth edition, addresses a wide range of writing activites and genres, from summarizing and responding to sources to writing the research paper and writing about literature. The book has been adapted by Mark Haas for presentation on this site. View this textbook ....

Involved: Writing for College, Writing for Your Self

by Charles Bazerman

Involved: Writing for College, Writing for Your Self helps students to understand their college experience as a way of advancing their own personal concerns and to draw substance from their reading and writing assignments. This edition of the book has been adapted from the print edition, published in 1997 by Houghton Mifflin. Copyrighted materials—primarily images and examples within the text—have been removed from this edition. View this textbook ....

A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading

By Ellen C. Carillo

The reading selections, assignments, and activities in this innovative textbook move students toward become more reflective, deliberate, and mindful readers and writers by providing opportunities to apply and reflect on multiple ways of reading and writing. Because many of the difficulties that students encounter when writing are related to the difficulties posed by reading complex texts, A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading gives instructors the tools to help students develop a repertoire of reading strategies that will help them become stronger readers and—by extension—stronger writers. View this textbook ....

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 1

Edited by Charlie Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky

The books in this series, published jointly by the WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, present peer-reviewed collections of essays—all composed by teachers for students—with each volume freely available for download under a Creative Commons license. The Writing Spaces mission is to build a library of quality open access texts for the writing classroom as an alternative to costly textbooks. Each series collection will contain engaging essays from different writing teachers in the field and will explore important topics about writing in a manner and style accessible both to teachers and students. View this textbook ....

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2

Edited by Charlie Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky

The second volume in the Writing Spaces series addresses topics including the rhetorical situation, collaboration, documentation styles, weblogs, invention, writing assignment interpretation, reading critically, information literacy, ethnography, interviewing, argument, document design, and source integration. View this textbook ....

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 3

Edited by Dana Driscoll, Mary Stewart and Matthew Vetter

The third volume of the Writing Spaces series continues the tradition of the first two books with topics such as voice and style in writing, rhetorical appeals, discourse communities, multimodal composing, visual rhetoric, credibility, exigency, working with personal experience in academic writing, globalized writing and rhetoric, constructing scholarly ethos, imitation and style, and rhetorical punctuation. View this textbook ....

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 4

Edited by Dana Driscoll, Megan Heise, Mary Stewart, and Matthew Vetter

The fourth volume of the Writing Spaces series continues the tradition of the first two books with topics diverse topics such as place-based research, source credibility, technologies of trust, equitable language practices, social media, accessibility, feedback, racial literacy, research communities, privacy and digital technologies, navigating social contexts, writing workflows, transfer, grading, genre, writing for social change, and more. View this textbook ....

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 5

Edited by Trace Daniels-Lerberg, Dana Driscoll, Mary K. Stewart, and Matthew Vetter

Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 5, is a collection of Creative Commons licensed essays for use in the first year writing classroom, all written by writing teachers for students. This volume continues the tradition of previous volumes with diverse topics such as advanced rhetoric, translanguaging and code-meshing practices, revision workflows, environmental justice, social annotation, Wikipedia, plagiarism, accessibility, data analysis, writing knowledge transfer, and more. Teaching strategies and discussion questions follow each chapter. View this textbook ....

The English Language: From Sound to Sense

By Gerald P. Delahunty and James J. Garvey

Grounded in linguistic research and argumentation, The English Language: From Sound to Sense is written to help readers become independent language analysts capable of critically evaluating claims about the language and the people who use it. Written in a clear style, it guides its readers on topics including basic assumptions about language and discourse, pronunciation, word-formation strategies, parts of speech, clause elements and patterns, how clauses may be combined into sentences, and how clauses and sentences are modified to suit speakers' and writers' discourse purposes. ... More

Writing Textbooks Available Elsewhere on the Web

Thanks to Andrea Olinger for her help in creating this list of open-access textbooks.

Other Textbooks Available Elsewhere on the Web