Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence By Amy Guptill, with contributions by Aly Button, Peter Farrell, Kaethe Leonard, and Timothée Pizarro.
Please join me in congratulating Amy Guptill on her publication of Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence, the newest Open SUNY Textbook!
Many high school students have mastered writing conventions but still struggle to understand and meet the expectations at the college level. Other students, perhaps out of school for a number of years, are getting reacquainted with academic writing while working to meet college-level challenges. Writing in College demystifies college-level expectations, helping students see the purpose behind the varied writing assignments they face.
Guptill skillfully positions specific and applicable advice about college writing within the larger framework of transitioning to the culture of the academy and college-level expectations. In addition, chapters can be read independently and assigned separately, and each is accompanied by further resources, suggested exercises, and advice from other student writers.
Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence
Available as ebook and PDF downloads, as well as online, at: textbooks.opensuny.org/
About the Textbook
Writing in College: From Competence to Excellence is designed for students who have largely mastered the conventions of high-school level writing and are now rising to meet more the advanced expectations of college. Students will find in Writing in College a warm invitation to think of themselves as full, self-motivated members of the academic community. With concise explanations, clear multi-disciplinary examples and empathy for the challenges of student life, this short textbook both explains the purposes behind college-level writing and offers indispensable advice for organization and expression.
About the Author
Amy Guptill is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The College at Brockport, SUNY where she has a joint appointment with the Delta College Program, an alternative interdisciplinary General Education option. Her research focuses on spatial and structural shifts in agriculture and food systems with recent work on innovative agricultural marketing. She teaches courses in the sociology of food, development and globalization, community and social change, social statistics and college writing. In addition to Writing In College: From Competence to Excellence, she is the coauthor of a recent college textbook entitled Food & Society: Principles and Paradoxes (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012).
Value of Open Access Textbooks
The author is thrilled to offer this book as an open textbook. The cost of commercial textbooks is an urgent and growing problem, and all students should have easy access to advice about how to get the most out of the hundreds of pages of writing they’ll do over the course of a four-year degree.
Licensed for reuse and remix, the Open SUNY Textbooks are a valuable addition to the open access textbook community. Freely available, the open access content is peer reviewed by fellow instructors and scholars for quality and then copy-edited before publication. Open textbooks are just one component of the open educational resources movement (OER) and provide high quality, reusable material for course instructors to create cost savings for students and institutions.
About Open SUNY Textbooks
The SUNY Textbook program is a creative means to improving access to educational materials while fostering a community of resources that spans disciplines and encourages interdisciplinary study. SUNY Libraries and faculty are leading SUNY’s open textbook publishing initiative and have already saved thousands of dollars for SUNY students. Having published 12 free online textbooks, with 14 more planned in the next 18 months, this innovative multi-institutional program is lowering the cost of textbooks for students in New York and beyond.
Open textbooks are available to everyone free of charge. Over 50,000 downloads of Open SUNY Textbooks occurred between February 1, 2015-December 14, 2015, with visitors and readers from all over the world. For program details, please visit http://textbooks.opensuny.org
