Westmont Magazine Written for Writers

As lead writer of “The College Writer: A Guide to Thinking, Writing, and Researching” (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), Randall VanderMey, professor of English, incorporated his own teaching techniques in the work, designed for college composition classes.

The team of five authors blended four books into one: a writer’s rhetoric featuring an extended investigation of one writer’s process; an anthology of student and professional models of various forms of writing; a guide to research and writing research papers; and a handbook of grammar, punctuation and mechanics.

The volume comes with a CD-ROM that includes an electronic version of the entire text with several hundred click-on audio, video, word processor and Internet links, as well as interactive, animated, self-paced writing exercises.

Students can also go to a Web site , www. thecollegewriter.com, for information and support.

The colorful work is well organized, easy to read and likely to appeal to college students —  all those who want to strengthen their writing skills. It’s a useful reference tool for high school and college students whether or not they take a composition class.

Several Westmont students and alums contributed essays to the book, which were selected from more than 3,000 submissions. Randy is using the guide in his first-year and advanced composition classes at Westmont and hopes that professors throughout the country will find it to be an effective tool in teaching college students how to write.