OER for Introductory Technical Writing

The "OER Guide for WR 227 Instructors: Using Open Educational Resources (OERs) in WR 227 Courses" aims to help instructors make sense of and sort the massively decentralized and varying content of existing OERs available to support technical and professional writing courses. This guide is intended as a resource for introductory technical writing course instructors to adapt an existing course to integrate OER resources, or, to build a new course with all-OER student resources. This guide was developed for the specific use of WR 227 instructors at Portland State University and across Oregon; however, the material in the guide or its presentation is not tied to any particular course and is therefore also useful for instructors of introductory technical writing and professional writing courses more broadly.

Open English @ SLCC originated from a shared desire to offer affordable, responsive, accessible instructional resources for students enrolled in composition courses at SLCC. This Pressbook is one part of the Open English project. It works as a local venue for faculty, students, and other members of the SLCC community to circulate ideas about and discuss writing in their lives.

Table of Content:

I. Writing: How We Do, Be, & Make in the World
II. Rhetoric: How We Examine Writing in the World
III. Action: How We Engage & Initiate Change Via Writing
IV. Deliberation: How We Make Strategic Writing Choices
V. Engagement: How We Utilize Literate Practices to Write
VI. Contingency: How We Situate Writing to Create Meaning
VII. Student-Authored Projects

This book presents technical writing as an approach to researching and carrying out writing that centers on technical subject matter. Each and every chapter is devoted to helping students understand that good technical writing is situationally-aware and context-driven. Technical writing doesn’t work off knowing the one true right way of doing things—there is no magic report template out there that will always work. Instead, the focus is on offering students a series of approaches they can use to map out their situations and do research accordingly.

Table of Contents
What is Technical Writing?
The User
Visual Communication & Technical Writing
Document Design in Technical Writing
Writing in Genres
Managing a Project
Research Methods for Technical Writing

This textbook guides students through rhetorical and assignment analysis, the writing process, researching, citing, rhetorical modes, and critical reading. Guided by Oregon's statewide college writing outcomes, this book collects previously published articles, essays, and chapters released under Creative Commons licenses into one free textbook available for online access or print-on-demand.

In Placing the History of College Writing, Nathan Shepley argues that pre-1950s composition history, if analyzed with the right conceptual tools, can pluralize and clarify our understanding of the relationship between the writing of college students and the writing's physical, social, and discursive surroundings. Even if the immediate outcome of student writing is to generate academic credit, Shepley shows, the writing does more complex rhetorical work. It gives students chances to uphold or adjust institutional codes for student behavior, allows students and their literacy sponsors to respond to sociopolitical issues in a city or state, enables faculty and administrators to create strategic representations of institutional or program identities, and connects people across disciplines, occupations, and geographic locations. Shepley argues that even if many of today's composition scholars and instructors work at institutions that lack extensive historical records of the kind usually preferred by composition historians, those scholars and teachers can mine their institutional collections for signs of the various contexts with which student writing dealt.

This Open Educational Resource is a collection of texts and materials that team together students’ familiarity with sports and critical inquiry skills. Sports has an undeniable fascination for cultural studies scholars, and the athletic competition and the social conversations it elicits can help students to see how ethical argumentation plays beyond the walls of the ivory tower. The Politics of Sports, as a broad field of study, is of interest to both scholars and pundits alike. Through inquiry into sports, students can see how debate functions in both academic and public spheres. We have found sports to inspire a wide range of independent research topics in our writing classrooms that challenge students to engage with complex research questions that delve into the social structures that shape what we value and how we act as citizens. Sports is often central to the college experience and ubiquitous in families and communities around the world. The wide variety of audiences interested in sports the personal, economic, and social values tied up in sports invites research writers to think carefully about audience, community, and stakes of argument. We believe that The Politics of Sports has the potential to capture the interest of college students in order to excite them to begin a research journey with a sense of authority and investment in a topic that is at once familiar and complex enough to yield a wide range of inquiry .

The Process of Research Writing is a web-based research writing textbook (or is that textweb?) suitable for teachers and students in research oriented composition and rhetoric classes.

The title of this book is The Process of Research Writing, and in the nutshell, that is what the book is about. A lot of times, instructors and students tend to separate “thinking,” “researching,” and “writing” into different categories that aren't necessarily very well connected. First you think, then you research, and then you write.

The reality is though that the possibilities and process of research writing are more complicated and much richer than that. We think about what it is we want to research and write about, but at the same time, we learn what to think based on our research and our writing. The goal of this book is to guide you through this process of research writing by emphasizing a series of exercises that touch on different and related parts of the research process.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Thinking Critically About Research
Chapter Two: Understanding and Using the Library and the Internet for Research
Chapter Three: Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Avoiding Plagiarism
Chapter Four: How to Collaborate and Write With Others
Chapter Five: The Working Thesis Exercise
Chapter Six: The Annotated Bibliography Exercise
Chapter Seven: The Critique Exercise
Chapter Eight: The Antithesis Exercise
Chapter Nine: The Categorization and Evaluation Exercise
Chapter Ten: The Research Essay
Chapter Eleven: Alternative Ways to Present Your Research
Chapter Twelve: Citing Your Research Using MLA or APA Style

This is a review of Professional Communication http://louis.oercommons.org/courses/professional-communication-oer/view by Doreen Piano, Associate Professor of English, University of New Orleans, LA.This rubric was developed by BCcampus. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.The rubric allows reviewers to evaluate OER textbooks using a consistent set of criteria. Reviewers are encouraged to remix this rubric and add their review content within this tool. If you remix this rubric for an evaluation, please add the title to the evaluated content and link to it from your review.

""Reading Poetry" has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions -- as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture."

This is a textbook that was originally designed for a 3000-level large lecture course on “Rhetorical Theory” at the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities. An interdisciplinary tradition, rhetorical theory describes how speech, representation, and power are managed by techniques and technologies of communication. The plan of this book moves from rhetoric as an art of speech to rhetoric as a technology of power. The early chapters provide definitions and context for rhetoric as speech, middle chapters (e.g., on signs, symbols, visual images, argumentation, and narrative) describe rhetoric as representation, and the concluding chapters (e.g., on settler colonialism, secrecy, and digital rhetoric) elaborate on rhetoric as a technology of power. Of course, there is considerable overlap across these areas: the chapter on “rhetoric and ideology” sets the stage for later understandings of rhetoric as power; the chapter on “the rhetorical situation” hearkens back to the introductory understanding of rhetoric as speech. The book includes (audio and/or video) recordings with each chapter, as well as guidelines for proposed written assignments. Students using this resource should gain a thorough understanding of what rhetoric is, how it was practiced historically and today, and the ways that rhetoric wields an invisible influence over contemporary public and political life. Additionally, this book is designed for use across a variety of modalities, including in-person, online (synchronous/asynchronous), and hybridized formats. Additional resources (PowerPoint slides, quiz/exam questions) are also available to confirmed instructors upon request.

This textbook provides students with guidelines for understanding writing tasks as intellectual work using Bloom’s Taxonomy and for treating the writing process as a set of variable activities that move along a trajectory from idea or assignment to a finished product. The book also includes chapters on strengthening reading strategies and on finding, evaluating, and using sources effectively.

This is a review of Expression and Inquiry (https://louis.oercommons.org/courses/expression-and-inquiry) completed by Erick Piller, Nicholls State University.

This is a review of The Word on College Reading and Writing completed by Erick Piller, Nicholls State University.

This is a review of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center’s “Tips and Tools,” a Creative Commons-licensed collection of resources on writing (https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/). It was completed by Erick Piller, Nicholls State University. 

Rhetoric Matters: A Guide to Success in the First Year Writing Class offers students necessary concepts and practice to learn all the elements needed for successful first year writing and set the stage for future writing success in college.
Chapter 1: The Introduction
Chapter 2: Reading in Writing Class
Chapter 3: Thinking and Analyzing Rhetorically
Chapter 4: Writing a Summary and Synthesizing
Chapter 5: The Writing Process
Chapter 6: Structuring, Paragraphing, and Styling
Chapter 7: Revising and Refining
Chapter 8: Multimodal Reading and Visual Rhetoric
Chapter 9: The Research Process
Chapter 10: Sources and Research
Chapter 11: Ethical Source Integration: Citation, Quoting, and Paraphrasing
Chapter 12: Documentation Styles: MLA and APA

This course is an introduction to the history, theory, practice, and implications of rhetoric, the art and craft of persuasion. This course specifically focuses on the ways that scientists use various methods of persuasion in the construction of scientific knowledge.

This course is an introduction to the theory, the practice, and the implications (both social and ethical) of rhetoric, the art and craft of persuasion. This semester, many of your skills will have the opportunity to be deepened by practice, including your analytical and critical thinking skills, your persuasive writing skills, and your oral presentation skills. In this course you will act as both a rhetor (a person who uses rhetoric) and as a rhetorical critic (one who studies the art of rhetoric). Both write to persuade; both ask and answer important questions. Always one of their goals is to create new knowledge for all of us, so no endeavor in this class is a "mere exercise."

The first in a two-volume set, A Rhetoric of Literate Action is written for "the experienced writer with a substantial repertoire of skills, [who] now would find it useful to think in more fundamental strategic terms about what they want their texts to accomplish, what form the texts might take, how to develop specific contents, and how to arrange the work of writing." The reader is offered a framework for identifying and understanding the situations writing comes out of and is directed toward; a consideration of how a text works to transform a situation and achieve the writer's motives; and advice on how to bring the text to completion and "how to manage the work and one's own emotions and energies so as to accomplish the work most effectively."

The RoughWriter's Guide is a writing handbook designed specifically for Yavapai College students. The Guide provides students with help navigating academic writing, including all aspects of the writing process, MLA and APA formatting, and grammatical and mechanical issues.

Table of Contents:
I. Studying in College
1. Developing Study Skills
2. Reading in College
3. Taking Notes and Annotating

II. Writing in College
4. Academic Writing
5. Basics of Rhetoric
6. Summary vs. Analysis

III. Pre-Writing
7. Overview of the Writing Process
8. Deciding on a Topic
9. Refining Your Topic

IV. Conducting Research
10. Doing Research
11. Keeping a Research Journal
12. Annotated Bibliography
13. Evaluating Sources

V. Planning
14. Thesis Writing
15. Creating a Title
16. Creating an Outline
17. Proper Paper Formatting: Introduction to MLA and APA
18. Formatting: MLA Style
19. Formatting APA Style

VI. Drafting
20. Introductions and Conclusions
21. Body Paragraph Basics
22. Using Quotes, Paraphrases, and Summaries
23. Avoiding Plagiarism

VII. Documentation
24. Creating a List of Sources Overview
25. List of Sources MLA Style: Works Cited
26. List of Sources APA: References Page
27. In-Text (Parenthetical) Citations

VIII. Revision
28. Revision Strategies
29. Sentence Variety
30. Transitions
31. Using Strong Verbs
32. Writing Clearly and Concisely
33. Aligning Ideas
34. Peer Review

IX. Editing
35. Editing Strategies
36. Grammar Basics: Understand the Vocabulary
37. All About Verbs: Tenses, Mood, and Subject-Verb Agreement
38. Identifying Fragments, Run-ons, and Comma Splices
39. Identifying Pronoun Problems
40. Checking Adjectives and Adverbs
41. Identifying Clarity Issues
42. Identifying Mechanics Problems
43. Identifying Punctuation Problems

X. Samples
44. Essay Checklists
45. Student Essay Example 1 (Argument) in MLA and APA Format
46. Student Essay Example 2 (Literary Analysis) in MLA
YC Writing Resources
Presenting Your Work
Writing Beyond Academia
Writing for Non-Native Speakers