Many instructors prefer to teach critical reading and writing without using a full-scale rhetoric. For them, Axelrod and Cooper have adapted the immensely successful approach of The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing and applied it to a reader, creating a book that provides both structure for students and flexibility for instructors. Chapter One introduces two general approaches to critical reading, showing students how to "read for meaning" and "read like a writer." Each of the following chapters then provides step-by-step guides to applying this knowledge in reading and writing a specific genre, ranging from autobiography to argument.

RISE B. AXELROD is McSweeney Professor of Rhetoric and?Teaching Excellence and director of composition 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 Diego.

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 Third 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 coauthor, with Susan Peck MacDonald, of Writing the World (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000).

Together, Axelrod and Cooper have coauthored for Bedford/St. Martin’s The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, Eighth Edition (2008) and Axelrod & Cooper’s Concise Guide to Writing, Fourth Edition (2005).

ALISON M. WARRINER is Coordinator of Composition, Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, and professor of English at California State University, East Bay, where she has also been Director of the Collaborative Academic Preparation Initiative and the Summer Writing Institutes. Previously she was Director of Communications at Sacred Heart University. She is a coauthor of Academic Literacy: A Statement of Competencies Expected of Students Entering California’s Public Colleges and Universities (2002) and of the Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) that is currently being introduced as Senior English into California public high schools through the Early Assessment Program of the CSU Chancellor’s Office.