Adapted from the best-selling St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, Axelrod and Cooper’s Concise Guide to Writing provides streamlined versions of the chapters covering six of the most commonly assigned genres in the first-year writing course — remembering events, writing profiles, explaining concepts, arguing a position, proposing a solution, and justifying an evaluation. The careful integration of well-chosen readings with guided writing instruction in these chapters is complemented by coverage of strategies for reading, writing, and research in brief-but-complete chapters at the end of the book. Read the preface.
Rise B. Axelrod is director of English composition and McSweeney Professor of Rhetoric and Teaching Excellence at the University of California, Riverside. She has previously been professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino; director of the College Expository Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and assistant director of the Third College Composition Program at the University of California, San Bernardino.
Charles R. Cooper is an emeritus professor in the department of literature at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as coordinator of the Thurgood Marshall College Composition Program, Dimensions of Culture Program, and Campus Writing Programs. He has also been codirector of the San Diego Writing Project, one of the National Writing Project Centers. He is coeditor, with Lee Odell, of Evaluating Writing and Research on Composing: Points of Departure, and coauthor, with Susan Peck MacDonald, of Writing the World (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000). In the Literature Department, Cooper taught upper-division writing workshops in the writing major and graduate seminars in composition studies. He proposed the PhD degree option in composition studies and chaired eleven dissertation committees. Cooper taught high school English for nine years in Sacramento and in Concord, California. During summer 1967, he was Assistant Director, Reed College Peace Corps Project, and trained volunteers to teach English language in Iran. After earning his PhD at U.C Berkeley in 1969, he taught at U.C. Riverside (1969-71), State University of New York at Buffalo (1971-79), and UC San Diego (1979-1994). He was Visiting Scholar at Stanford University in spring 1979. He has lectured widely (for example, Karlova, Norwich, Toronto, UCLA, Ohio State, Iowa, Pittsburgh, CUNY) and has been a visiting professor at the University of Iowa and the University of Stockholm. He advised the National Assessment of Educational Progress-Writing (1973-1981) and coordinated the development of California's first statewide writing assessment (1986-1991). For over fifty years, his primary interest has been the history, theory, practice, and assessment of school and college writing instruction, both in stand-alone courses and across the disciplines. His college textbook (coauthored with Rise Axelrod,) for first-year writing courses has been widely adopted
