The WAC Clearinghouse
supporting scholarly exchange about communication across the disciplines
supporting scholarly exchange about communication across the disciplines
By Charles Bazerman
The Informed Writer, offered here in its first open-access edition, addresses a wide range of writing activites and genres, from summarizing and responding to sources to writing the research paper and writing about literature. This edition of the book has been adapted from the fifth edition, published in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin. Copyrighted materials—primarily examples within the text—have been removed from this edition.
Charles Bazerman is Professor and past Chair of the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His many publications include Writing Selves / Writing Societies (co-edited with David R. Russel), Shaping Written Knowledge, A Rhetoric of Literate Action, and A Theory of Literate Action. His book, The Languages of Edison's Light, won the Association of American Publisher's award for the best scholarly book of 1999 in the History of Science and Technology.
Publication Information: Bazerman, Charles. (2010). The Informed Writer: Using Sources in the Disciplines. The WAC Clearinghouse. Fort Collins, CO. Available at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/informedwriter/
Publication History: This edition of the book is adapted from the fifth edition of The Informed Writer, published in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin. Previous editions, all by Houghton Mifflin, appeared in 1992 (4th ed.), 1989 (3rd ed.), 1985 (2nd ed.), and 1981 (1st ed.).
Publication Date: January 1, 2011 (WAC Clearinghouse). This book was also made available on Writing@CSU (http://writing.colostate.edu/textbooks/informedwriter) on October 18, 2010.
An introduction to this book is also available, courtesy of Natalie Harmann, in Polish at http://www.besteonderdelen.nl/blog/?p=10168.
Chapter 2: Reacting to Reading: Annotations and Journals
Chapter 3: Paraphrasing: The Author's Thoughts in Your Words
Chapter 4: Summarizing: The Author's Main Ideas
Chapter 5: Developing Responses to Readings: Essays
Chapter 6: Recognizing the Many Voices in a Text
Chapter 7: Analyzing the Author's Purpose and Technique
Chapter 8: Evaluating the Book as a Whole: The Book Review
Chapter 9: Comparing and Synthesizing Sources
Chapter 10: Writing the Research Paper
Chapter 11: A guide to Reference and Documentation
Chapter 12: Creating Knowledge
Chapter 13: Reading and Writing about Past Events: The Humanities and Historical Sciences
Chapter 15: Reading and Writing about Designed Events: The Experimental Sciences
Chapter 16: Reading and Writing about Generalizations: Theoretical Disciplines
Practice & Pedagogy
Series Editor: Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF).