For courses in Writing across the Curriculum or Writing in the Disciplines.
This version of Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum has been updated to reflect the 8th Edition of the MLA Handbook (April 2016)*
Effective writing skills for students of all majors and interests
One of the best-selling interdisciplinary composition texts for over twenty-five years, Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum guides readers through the essential college-level writing skills of summary, critique, synthesis, analysis, and research.
The 13th Edition is divided into three parts. Part one, “Structures and Strategies,” takes readers step by step through the process of writing papers based on source material, explaining and demonstrating how summaries, critiques, syntheses, and analyses can be generated from the kinds of readings individuals will encounter later in the book–and throughout their academic careers. Part two, “Brief Takes,” bridges the gap between writing instruction and readings with a series of step-by-step exercises. The anthology in part three provides a wide range of carefully selected, cross-disciplinary readings, including two new chapters on rumor and advertising. Topics are engaging and students will appreciate how these topics correspond to their interests in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences.
* The 8th Edition introduces sweeping changes to the philosophy and details of MLA works cited entries. Responding to the “increasing mobility of texts,” MLA now encourages writers to focus on the process of crafting the citation, beginning with the same questions for any source. These changes, then, align with current best practices in the teaching of writing which privilege inquiry and critical thinking over rote recall and rule-following.
Laurence Behrens
Laurence Behrens has focused for more than thirty-five years on interdisciplinary approaches to the teaching of undergraduate writing. His Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, co-authored with Leonard J. Rosen, originally published in 1982 and now in its 13th edition, was the first widely-used cross-curricular textbook in freshman composition.
Dr. Behrens earned an A.B. in Theatre Arts from Brandeis University, an M.F.A. in Film, Radio, and Television from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in literature from UCLA. He has taught at UCLA, the University of California at Irvine, The American University in Washington, D.C., and most recently, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was one of the original members of the interdisciplinary Writing Program at UCSB, where he originated the lower division course in writing about classical music. He has also taught lower-division courses in writing about sociology and psychology. At the upper division level, he has taught business writing, legal writing, and writing about history and film studies, as well as graduate seminars in writing for teaching assistants.
His articles have appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, The English Journal, The Maryland Composition Review, Freshman English News, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Notes and Queries, Literature/Film Quarterly, and The Journal of the University Film Association. In addition to Sequence for Academic Writing and Writing Across the Curriculum, Dr. Behrens’ other books with Leonard J. Rosen include Writing Papers in College, Reading for College Writers, Theme and Variations: The Impact of Great Ideas, and The Allyn & Bacon Handbook. He has also authored the historically-oriented The American Experience: A Writer’s Sourcebook and the legal casebook for undergraduate writers, Making the Case: An Argument Reader.
Leonard Rosen
After earning a B.A. in English and Education at Trinity College (Hartford), Leonard Rosen taught high school English in Baltimore City before earning his Ph.D. in Literary Studies, with a focus in composition, at The American University. He went on to teach at Bentley University and in the Expository Writing Program at Harvard University.
In addition to best-selling textbooks co-authored with Laurence Behrens, most notably Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum and Sequence for Academic Writing, he has written (and read) commentaries for Boston’s NPR station and written numerous op-eds published in the Boston Globe, Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. He is also an award-winning novelist, the author of All Cry Chaos (translated into ten languages) and The Tenth Witness.
