| Book Review: The Macmillan Reader | |||||||
| By Glenda Inverarity | |||||||
Writing essays, term papers and theses is the most important work that students do. Students who do not master writing skills quickly, often reflect poorer grades than they should, just because their writing skills are weak. The Macmillan Reader is an excellent that can help improve your essay writing. This book is a complete guide to becoming a competent and capable writer, adapting essays to a variety of writing styles. It begins with the reading process, because every good student writer must be a reader. Consider chapter one. The highlight of this chapter one is an article written by Phyllis Theroux who is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post. Marginal annotations show and describe how the article was developed, and how subtle ideas early in the article are gradually built upon to create a strong argument. Chapter two is a thorough description of the writing process. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book. The remaining chapters form the heart of The Macmillan Reader and focus on different essay writing styles such as:
Each of the above chapters has a standard format that makes the book not only easy to understand and follow, but also allows the reader to jump around to sections of interest. Take the chapter on writing description for example. The chapter follows this structure:
The student essay has marginal annotations explaining the essay development, and the commentary expands on all the marginal annotations. This is really helpful in assisting the reader to apply the theory of the essay writing style discussed in the early part of the chapter. The book a really useful "Do-It-Yourself" guide to better essay writing. The subject index makes this book even more useful. The subject index organizes essays by theme and style. For example, you may study essays written about Health and Medicine from the style of description, process analysis, cause-effect and argument-persuasion to discover what method might be the best approach for their own essay needs.The themes that are covered are:
This book is packed with hundreds of interesting essays, all with exercises to help students develop their own writing skills. Because many of the essays are written by famous writers such as Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Mark Twain to mention just a few, this book is also great for a bit of bedtime or leisure reading, in addition to being an extremely valuable study resource. Complete Info: Nadell, Judith, langan, John, & McMeniman, Linda; The Macmillan Reader. ISBN: 0205282164. Publisher: Allyn & Bacon. Pub Date: 1998
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