Sequence for Academic Writing, A [Rental Edition]

For courses in First-Year Composition – Rhetoric, Writing Across the Curriculum, or Writing in the Disciplines.

A brief rhetoric focusing on the key strategies that any academic writer needs to know–summary, synthesis, analysis, and critique.

A Sequence for Academic Writing focuses on the critical reading and writing strategies that readers and students need in order to thoughtfully interpret and incorporate source material into their own papers. Building off the hallmark writing instruction of the best-selling Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum , the authors adapted its rhetoric portion to be used apart from any additional reading content. The resulting learning resource employs high-interest readings from a range of disciplines that allow readers to practice these strategies and skills, along with numerous student papers that model the kinds of academic texts that students are expected to produce.

The 7th Edition offers a major revision of a familiar text that freshens examples, clarifies and expands instruction, and generally makes more accessible a book that has helped introduce numerous readers to source-based writing in a variety of settings.

A Sequence for Academic Writing , 7th Edition is also available via Revel™, an interactive learning environment that enables students to read, practice, and study in one continuous experience. Learn more.

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.

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.

1. An Introduction to Thinking and Writing in College

I. Structures

2. Reading with Attention

3. Summarizing and Paraphrasing Sources

4. Quoting Sources, Using Signal Phrases, and Making Standard 'Moves'

5. Critical Reading and Critique

6. Explanatory Synthesis

7. Argument Synthesis

8. Analysis

II. Strategies

9. Writing as a Process

10. Locating, Mining, and Citing Sources

11. Practicing Academic Writing