The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines
- WID, Rhetoric, Pedagogy, Writing
By Charles Bazerman
The Informed Writer, offered here in its first open-access edition, addresses a wide range of writing activities and genres, from summarizing and responding to sources to writing the research paper and writing about literature. This edition of the book has been adapted from the fifth edition, published in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin. Copyrighted materials—primarily examples within the text—have been removed from this edition.
Table of Contents
Open the entire book: In PDF Format 
Chapter 2: Reacting to Reading: Annotations and Journals
Chapter 3: Paraphrasing: The Author's Thoughts in Your Words
Chapter 4: Summarizing: The Author's Main Ideas
Chapter 5: Developing Responses to Readings: Essays
Chapter 6: Recognizing the Many Voices in a Text
Chapter 7: Analyzing the Author's Purpose and Technique
Chapter 8: Evaluating the Book as a Whole: The Book Review
Chapter 9: Comparing and Synthesizing Sources
Chapter 10: Writing the Research Paper
Chapter 11: A guide to Reference and Documentation
Chapter 12: Creating Knowledge
Chapter 13: Reading and Writing about Past Events: The Humanities and Historical Sciences
Chapter 15: Reading and Writing about Designed Events: The Experimental Sciences
Chapter 16: Reading and Writing about Generalizations: Theoretical Disciplines
About Charles Bazerman
Charles Bazerman is Professor and past Chair of the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His many publications include Writing Selves / Writing Societies (co-edited with David R. Russel), Shaping Written Knowledge, A Rhetoric of Literate Action, and A Theory of Literate Action. His book, The Languages of Edison's Light, won the Association of American Publisher's award for the best scholarly book of 1999 in the History of Science and Technology.
Publication Information: Bazerman, Charles. (2010). The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines. The WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/practice/informedwriter/ (Originally published 1995 by Houghton Mifflin)
Publication History: This edition of the book is adapted from the fifth edition of The Informed Writer, published in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin. Previous editions, all by Houghton Mifflin, appeared in 1992 (4th ed.), 1989 (3rd ed.), 1985 (2nd ed.), and 1981 (1st ed.).
Publication Date: January 1, 2011 (WAC Clearinghouse). This book was also made available on Writing@CSU (http://writing.colostate.edu/textbooks/informedwriter) on October 18, 2010.
Practices & Possibilities
Series Editor: Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF).
Copyright © 2010 Charles Bazerman. 293 pages, with illustrations. Available in digital format for no charge on this page at the WAC Clearinghouse. This book is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. You may view this book. You may print personal copies of this book. You may link to this page. You may use and adapt the material in this book with attribution to its author.