Writing Matters

Writing Matters offers easy-to-understand, down-to-earth, practical advice about how to write good essays. In the twenty-two short chapters, Peter G. Beidler talks about how to find a topic, the importance of a bold and clear thesis, how to select and organize the evidence that will best support that thesis, what information to put into your introduction, how to write concretely, what "voice" in an essay is, how to write for various audiences, how to doctor a sickly paragraph, and so on. Each chapter is composed as a model essay, so that as students read for information about writing, they also read a series of model essays that show them what a completed essay looks like. One of the most useful parts of the book is the closing section on editing, which contains clear advice, with lots of examples, on how to avoid forty of the most common writing errors. Writing Matters was originally written as a guide for first-year composition students, but it has also been used with success in advanced high school English courses for students preparing for the writing portion of the SAT, and even as a guide for upperclass college students and graduate students for whom English is a second language.