Landmark Textbook Writing in the Arts and Sciences Re-released

Writing in the Arts and Sciences by Elaine P. Maimon, Gerald L. Belcher, Gail W. Hearn, Barbara F. Nodine, and Finbarr W. O'Connor is now available in open-access format from the WAC Clearinghouse.  The book is in the Landmark Publications in Writing series.

Published by Winthrop Publishers in 1981, Writing in the Arts and Sciences is one of the first and certainly the most successful of the early textbooks that emerged from a WAC movement that was, when the book was first conceived, still in its first decade.

Drawing from work at Beaver College (now Arcadia University) as well as a series of national seminars on WAC, the authors address both writing to learn and learning to write, with chapters devoted to writing in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

In their preface, the authors observe, “Each discipline has traditions that shape the reading and writing of its practitioners, but these scholarly traditions, with their specialized procedures, conventions, and terminology, may appear to the student as mysterious rites of passage. The purpose of this text is to cast light on those mysterious academic rites that until recently have been open to too few.”