Expository Composition: Discovering Your Voice

“Expository Composition: Discovering Your Voice is smart, useful, and hopeful,” Naomi Shihab Nye writes in the foreword to this exciting new writing textbook. “A reader may quickly believe that Romano and Anderson have been there, in so many vivid classrooms, with real, live, idiosyncratic students, and good things have come of those relationships, on the page.”

With over fifty years of combined high school teaching experience behind them, Tony Romano and Gary Anderson offer a text that can be used in a semester-long expository writing class or as a supplement to other English courses. This book will teach students advanced writing, editing, and research techniques and new ways to focus their creativity, and will also prepare them for rich, deep, and insightful college writing, while encouraging them to develop and celebrate their own unique voice.

Includes

Professional and Student Models

• Published authors such as Eudora Welty, Natalie Goldberg, Richard Rodriguez, and Dave Chappelle, as well as real high school students writing across the country, exemplify the categories of writing taught in each chapter.
• Each professional and student model includes discussion questions about content, style, and writing techniques.

Journal Topics

• Ideas for free-writing or journaling relate to the content of each chapter.
• Thought-provoking topics may lead to essay topics or serve as prewriting for other essays.

Writers on Writing

• Published writers inspire student writers with honest, practical quotes about language and writing techniques.

Writing Tips

• The textbook gives students abundant suggestions for keeping track of ideas, coming up with topics, finding time to write, and making meaningful revisions.

Practice Opportunities

• Exercises allow students to practice the writing techniques learned in each chapter.
• Practice opportunities can be done individually, in small groups, or as a class.

Chapter Assignment

• Chapters include guidance on prewriting, possible writing topics, and questions for revision and peer review.

Appendices
End-of-text reference material includes:

• Grammar handbook
• Graphic organizers
• Writing for the SAT and ACT
• Documentation of sources

Teacher’s Guide

• Additional discussion questions for model essays
• Advice to teachers
• Activities (1-4 per chapter)
• Guidelines, standards, or rubrics for grading essays

Author info:

Tony Romano teaches English and psychology at William Fremd High School in Palatine, Illinois, and was named 2010 Illinois Author of the Year. He is a graduate of DePaul University (B.A.) and Northeastern Illinois University (M.A.). An award-winning fiction writer, Mr. Romano is the author of the novel, When the World Was Young, and the story collection, If You Eat, You Never Die. He is the coauthor of Psychology and You, a high school text. His fiction has been produced for National Public Radio and has appeared in The Chicago Tribune Magazine and numerous literary journals. He lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

Gary Anderson is English Department Chair of William Fremd High School in Palatine, Illinois. He is a graduate of Wartburg College (B.A.) and Iowa State University (M.A.). An award-winning poet, Mr. Anderson’s writing has appeared in numerous scholarly journals, literary magazines and anthologies, and received honors from the Illinois Arts Council and others. He lives in Arlington Heights, Illinois.

Both authors help organize William Fremd High School’s annual Writers Week, a literary festival that brings together writers from around the nation to read and discuss their work with students and teachers.