The new St. Martin's handbook teaches, in clear and easy language, the basic reading,writing, grammar and study skills required college as well as graduate school, especially international students and amateur readers. this book's step-by-step approach allows readers to move from simple skill to more higher and advanced state. In my opinion, it is the best of one. Thanks.

I work at a local hopital as a registered nurse, and as you know there are a lot of new drugs out there everyday. I have used many different drug books over the years, but this is the first time I have used Saunders. We just got one at the hospital, where I work, after it was released and I love it. It combines all the good parts of all the other drugbooks I have used, in my career, and placed them in a well thought out and easy to read book. I especially like the pull out compatibility chart in the front. The book also contains drug interactions, including some herbal interaction (and believe me, more and more people are turning to herbs than ever before) onset, duration, half lifes, and even patient teaching and more. I have not got to look through the whole book yet, but I am definatly going to get one to put on my reference shelf at home.

I bought this book after reading several articles written by Corbett. As a GTA, I hoped it might be useful in teaching freshman composition. Although I found it helpful, it is certainly not written for most of today's college freshmen. Although Corbett uses fairly simple language, the text fails to use principles of document design to present the information effectively. Although this text was originally intended to be used in teaching freshman composition, I do not believe that it will be as useful to me in the classroom as I had hoped. I would not, for example, be able to assign readings from directly from this text and expect my students to grasp the material. Today's college students appear to be far less willing to work to get the information they need from a text, and this text definitely requires work.

This book should be required reading for all college graduates.

Rhetoric has come to be seen as a discipline for frauds and charlatans. It has the connotation of artful trickery and deception. No matter what you may think of rhetoric, you engage in it each and every time you try to prevail upon someone to see things your way. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Any artform practiced by mortals can be (and is) misused by unscrupulous villains. Those who decry rhetoric for its susceptibility to misuse overlook this point: Rhetoric, properly understood and applied, is the best defense against misused rhetoric.

For a good grounding in the basics of rhetoric, the student need look no farther than this textbook. It is not easy reading, but diligent study will equip the reader well for the tasks of analyzing, defending, and making arguments. The book aims at the written word, but the principles apply as well to the spoken.

The book divides itself into six chapters:
1. Introduction
2. Discovery of Arguments (Deciding what to say).
3. Arrangement of Material (Marshalling your arguments for greatest effect).
4. Style (How best to speak/write your arguments).
5. The Progymnasmata (Exercises in rhetoric).
6. A Survey of Rhetoric (History of rhetoric from Ancient Greece to modern times).

This book is a great guide in writing, especially for papers involving documentation and bibliographies. It gives different formats too.

For executives who need immediate and convenient access to information about correct grammar, punctuation, word usage, etc. (and especially for executives who frequently travel), here is the single best source. It can easily fit within an attaché case or carry-on bag. It also includes an "almanac of resources across the disciplines" which include oral and multimedia presentation, arts and humanities, business/economics/finance, sciences and technology, and social sciences. Readers will also appreciate having a section which explains "MLA Style Papers" as well as a "Glossary of Terms" and a "Glossary of Usage." For me, one of this pocket guide's greatest benefits is comprised of the various checklists which Lunsford provides. For example, in Chapter 34, Lunsford provides a step-by-step sequence by which to proceed from an initial analysis of context to a general topic and then to a working thesis. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Gilman's Get to the Point! as well as Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and Rodale's The Synonym Finder.

I have found EasyWriter to be the most cogent, yet comprehensive, pocket guide to grammar, usage, style, research sources, and documentation available. I have successfully used this guide ever since it came out at both MIT and Harvard Extension School, with students in the humanities, sciences, engineering, and the social sciences, particularly urban studies and planning. Written by the authors of The New St. Martin's Handbook, the best combination handbook/rhetoric out there, it contains more than just a subset of their excellent, revision-based advice on the principles of grammar, style, and usage. The chapter For Multilingual Writers is a fine treatment of the particular problems encountered by those for whom English is a foreign language.The comprehensive treatment of citation formats for MLA, APA, Chicago, and CBE is both complete and easy to use, as well as being much handier than any of those formats' full-length style guides.The glossaries of terms and usage are also particularly useful, in these days when it seems that the schools have adbicated their responsibility to teach the basic structure and terminology of the language.

But what sets this guide apart from all the others is the inclusion throughout of material dealing with online communication, from discussions and examples of online style to listings of credentialed Web sites and the essential print journals for research in 15 disciplines, from art through sociology. This is one handbook that shows awareness of the ways in which educated people in all fields are writing, communicating, and conducting research today-both online and in libraries.

Both authors are established, well-known, and highly respected scholars in the fields of rhetoric and communication, as well as effective practitioners of the arts comprised by their research. EasyWriter is by far the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and useful guide to writing in the contemporary environments of academia, business, and research. I highly recommend it for anyone who can appreciate and benefit from a mature approach to tackling the difficulties presented by communication today.

This is a excellent resourse for the young writter to get reference how to write up reference and other english grammer. This book helped me in writting up my thesis and papers. This book can be used by graduate and undergraduate students. I recommend every home, office, and research laboratories ,universities should had it on there desk for reference. This is good resourse for International students, involved in any type of writing papers in scenitific journals.

The book examines the development of a compositional trend nobody but this obscure and self-important author recognizes or really cares about. It might contain some valuable information for those willing to wade through Connors' bombastic pseudo-victorian prose. The cover is lovely, though.

For several weeks now, I have been considering how to defend the utility of Robert Connors's book - Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy - without sounding like a die-hard partisan, a rabid fan, or a closet sexist-racist-capitalist-non-radical pig-dog. To be blunt, Robert Connors is such an easy target that, at times, it seems like everyone wants to take a shot at him. In May of 1999, for example, I first noticed the nasty review on this web-site. And even for those scholars like Sharon Crowley who believe that the involvement of approximately four million first-year college students each year makes composition-rhetoric worth caring about, Connors routinely and invariably finds a pressure point. At conferences, he asks gadfly-ish questions in which he implies that radical pedagogical approaches and, indeed, most theoretical approaches of the last thirty or so years may well be "fads." In College English, he asserts that "the world of pure epistemological theory is not the world we live in," argues that there is a need for men's studies, too, and expresses sympathy for the men's movement (Pagan!). He seems to want all teachers in the academy to be, and be seen as, learned scholars (Idolatry!). And finally, he has the audacity to doubt the academic commonplace that "we live in a postmodern world" (Heresy! Blasphemy!). Not surprisingly, as of November 10, 1999, no composition studies peer has felt motivated enough to add a positive review to the Amazon site. However, the book is useful to practitioners of composition-rhetoric because each chapter presents enough evidence (what he calls "shareable data") to encourage practitioners to articulate and strengthen the rationale for their current practices.

Early in the book, Connors justifies his work with a plea for contextualization: "We can, I hope, come to understand in a richer way the reasons rhetoric has been what it has, how it has changed, and how it is changing today." That last concern over contemporary changes in rhetoric stands out as a useful reminder to those of us trying to rest our practices on a disciplinary foundation, while at the same time trying to preserve our ability to improve those practices. Connors' contribution here is to establish how the discipline of composition-rhetoric evolved inseparably from its "host" society, and his book is a worthy attempt to tell the history of composition-rhetoric from a moderate-to-conservative intellectual stance.