Reviews for First Steps in Academic Writing

The average rating for First Steps in Academic Writing based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-11-12 00:00:00 Greg Schooler A textbook assigned for teaching writing classes, level 2 (low-intermediate) in my institution. It's not bad. The structure of the book is interesting, and the material provided is suitable for my students. However, it doesn't seem to be strong enough to help student acquire/learn the required information. Not all topics were explained in a clear manner. I needed to consult other textbooks and material to support my classes and provide students with what they needed to learn. Overall, I think the book is good to help plan the structure of a writing course, but it's not enough to be the only textbook consulted.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-30 00:00:00 Edward Kooij Used as the writing text for a low-intermediate writing class at a community college. On the whole, my students didn't find this text as useful as its predecessor (Weaving It Together, Book 2 by Milada Broukal), although the book did have certain strengths, such as making the writing and editing process explicit and providing plenty of good model paragraphs. However, I was not a fan of some of the exercises that involved sentence parsing -- analyzing sentence structure. For example, here are the directions for one exercise to analyze complex sentences: "Step 1: Underline the independent clauses with a solid line and the dependent clauses with a broken line. Step 2: Draw a circle around the subordinate. Step 3: Add a comma if one is needed." Well, as you might imagine, some confusion ensued, and at times I spent more time explaining how to do the exercise than in getting the point of the exercise across. I found myself either not assigning these exercises or amending the directions to make them less confusing.