Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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An Introduction to the Analysis of Fiction
Michael Walonen · Saint Peter's University Press · 2023
An introductory primer introducing undergraduate students to the methodology of analyzing works of fiction.
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Alternatives to Agonism: Ethical Approaches to Argument in the Composition Classroom
Kristina Fennelly · The Pennsylvania Alliance for Design of Open Textbooks (PA-ADOPT) · 2025
This textbook urges students to reconsider traditional notions of argument by inviting them to explore non-adversarial approaches to the arguments that structure their academic and every day lives. After briefly exploring familiar aspects of the “argument culture”—a pervasive, warlike approach to polarizing issues—the textbook turns its attention to unearth more constructive approaches based in listening rhetoric, feminist rhetoric, Rogerian rhetoric, empathy, respect, civility, and an overall ethical treatment of argument. Using the context of a town hall meeting, students are guided in practicing deliberation, investigation, and content analysis of arguments that play out in public social media forums. Chapters feature class discussion exercises, sample essay assignments, and links to relevant Ted Talks, podcasts, and other multi-media sources. The textbook concludes with reflection pieces written by Kutztown University students, alumni, faculty, and staff who all seek to answer the prevailing question of this textbook: “What does it mean to be a worthy arguer?”
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Advanced Composition
Collette Bliss; Ashleigh Severson · University of Arkansas · 2024
Welcome to Advanced Composition! In this course, we embark on a journey through the art and craft of writing, exploring various forms, styles, and purposes of composition. Over the semester, we will delve into four distinct units, each designed to equip students with the necessary information to complete the four major assignments in the course.
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Just YA
Sarah Donovan · Oklahoma State University · 2024
This open-access anthology features short texts that can be read in a single class period and are designed to spark deep conversations. Organized around themes of being, love, land, world, and futures, these poems, essays, and flash fiction offer inclusive and affirming perspectives to align with junior high and high school English language arts (ELA) curriculum. With contributions from acclaimed young adult authors, flash fiction writers, and teacher-poets, Just YA provides educators with contemporary texts that resonate with and inspire today’s students to write their own stories. The overall work, JustYA, is licensed CC BY. Each of the chapters, however, are licensed CC-BY-NC-ND. This means you may re-use and share portions of the book, but the authors request that individual pieces be left intact as originally written when used in subsequent works.
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A Guide to Composition
Sandra Leonard · The Pennsylvania Alliance for Design of Open Textbooks (PA-ADOPT) · 2025
A Guide to Composition (2025) is an introduction to college writing and research. The text begins by defining basic principles of rhetoric and composition using popular texts such as advertisements, speeches, and news media. This textbook then moves to the specific genres of narrative and argument. Elements of the writing process are emphasized throughout the text in addressing writing center use, idea generation, library use, peer review, and ethical attribution including some discussion of A.I. Each chapter is written by current or former Kutztown University faculty and students, making it particularly well-suited to Kutztown University students; however, chapters two through eight are particularly inviting to wider audiences. Each chapter contains a number of writing process activities that may be useful as classroom activities or homework assignments.
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Music Composition & Theory
Justin Rubin · University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing · 2024
A Step-by-Step Method for student composers to write in a variety of styles, genres, and forms. Driven by simple model examples and accompanied by audio samples, it is intended to develop individual creativity and confidence in writing and, in so doing, explore the student’s inherent expressive talents. Each chapter provides reference examples from the literature for the student to discover works by master composers.
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Polyphony: Reader and Explorations for First-Year Writing
Jennie Snow; Elise Takehana; Diego Ubiera · ROTEL · 2024
Polyphony is a functional, creative, and radical resource for facilitating critical conversations about multilingualism, the politics of language, and linguistic justice in the first-year writing classroom. Texts and activities explore diverse perspectives on themes like silencing/voicing, language extinction and reclamation, (in)visibility, translation, agency, and validation, among others. Designed for use by both instructors and students, this book is meant to be used in a variety of combinations and highlights multiple modes of writing, including personal narrative, textual analysis, argumentation, reflection, and research. Embracing a “polyphonic” approach to first-year writing, this book presents connections between texts, authors, and ideas that actively engage students and instructors in critical conversations about language, education, and the institutionalization of both.
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Literary Studies for a Sustainable Future: An Introductory Course with Social Justice and Ecocriticism Intersections
Lisette Espinoza Vazquez · ROTEL · 2024
Literary Studies for a Sustainable Future: An Introductory Course with Social Justice and Ecocriticism Intersections is a university literature textbook that offers a sampling of the vast array of storytelling and literary traditions from around the world. Led by course outcomes, the book’s readings, activities, and assignments aim to establish a 21st century framework. Novice literary scholars establish correlations between local and regional literature with those from distant lands on relevant concerns and topics, like those outlined by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Through songs and folklore, film clips, poetry, myth, storytelling, and satirical theater, its chapters feature key literary texts and terms to present literature as vital community-sustaining cultural expressions. Learners witness the roles literature have on climate, ecology, and social justice challenges.
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Green Tea Intermediate English Communication OER
Eric Dodson; Luciana Diniz; Nanci Leiton · Open Oregon Educational Resources · 2020
This set of multimedia materials incorporates interesting topics and real-world language in an accessible way for adult English language learners at the low-to-mid intermediate level, using eclectic methods (communicative activities, content-based instruction lite, focus on form), all while maintaining a connection to our learners’ lives. Each unit has handouts, presentation slides, key vocabulary lists, informative speeches recorded by ESOL teachers at PCC, dialogs, extension activities, and additional videos or materials for assessment. The videos can be linked to directly, embedded in a class page or Learning Management System (LMS, such as Canvas), or downloaded. Closed captioned versions of the videos are also available. Teachers can incorporate everything here, or take an a la carte approach with their existing activities and curricula. To make it easier to navigate these materials, we are gathering them in a pressbooks site as well. That site may make it easier for teachers to navigate and share links with students. Like any set of classroom materials, this OER is not a “class in a box.” We anticipate that teachers will have their own approach to in-class (or synchronous online) activities, out-of-class work, assessments, and speeches, so we’re not offering a one-size-fits-all solution. These materials are openly shared (with the exception of youtube videos, where noted), which means you have all the permission you need to use, adapt, and re-share them. All we ask is to attribute the materials to “Green Tea Communication OER,” and, if you have a moment, let us know if you found the materials helpful. Please let us know if you have feedback, questions, or additional contributions to this project: eric.dodson@pcc.edu, luciana.diniz@pcc.edu and nleiton@pcc.edu
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Creative Translation for Real-World Contexts: English ↔ Spanish
Remy Attig · Bowling Green State University Libraries · 2024
Creative Translation for Real-World Contexts is one of the first translation textbooks designed for Spanish/English speakers at an intermediate-high (B2) level. This book introduces students to the basic ideas of translation while addressing frequent pain points that recur when working bidirectionally. Additionally, a focus is placed on fostering metacognitive skills by encouraging creative translation from real-world environments such as narration, business, advertising, specialized contexts (including inclusive and queer language), and in situations when there are no clear translations available, such as sci-fi and fantasy works. Chapters alternate between Spanish and English as the languages of discussion, thus providing an equitable challenge for native speakers of both languages.
![Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing [Revised Edition]](/api/files/covers/otl-1620.webp)
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Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing [Revised Edition]
Kisha Tracy · ROTEL · 2024
In first-year writing courses, it can often feel that we practice writing and research in a vacuum. Writing is about communication, and, if we do not feel that we have an audience, then it can seem like our writing has no purpose (even though practice of any kind will help us develop these skills). Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing is a method for students to think about the social changes that were prevalent during the COVID years and remain important in their wake. Heritages of Change is a lens for thinking and writing about these ideas. Through curation and exhibition as an act of activism, students focus on a specific audience with whom they can communicate authentically about this dynamic world.
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(Re)Writing Communities and Identities
Phillip Marzluf; Anna Goins; Cindy Debes; Stacia Gray · New Prairie Press · 2021
(Re)Writing Communities and Identities enables college-level students to develop their ability to compose various informative and expressive genres, including analyses, reflections, summaries, syntheses, and informative reports. While students raise their consciousness about their writing process and audience-based informative strategies, they also familiarize themselves with important social and cultural issues related to the theme of "identities and communities."
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Introduction to Literature: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and How They Shape Us
Judy Young · University of West Florida Pressbooks · 2023
Introduction to Literature: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and How They Shape Us introduces college freshmen to the study of literature through a focus on texts that, generally, they already know, or think they know, and how those texts aim to shape audiences to be compliant cultural objects. The book is organized around several prominent story groups, including various genres and forms, meant to promote discussion and discovery leading to students’ understanding that these texts function as cultural sculptors of readers’ principles and behaviors. Students develop the skill of analyzing texts and creating sound arguments about them through class discussions and a series of writing assignments. Ideally, they leave the course understanding how to create a sound argument and, more pointedly, that there is no such thing as “just a story.”
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Surface and Subtext: Literature, Research, Writing
James Francis, Jr.; Claire Carly-Miles; Kimberly Clough; R. Paul Cooper · Texas A&M University · 2024
Open-educational resource textbook created by the TAMU English 203 OER Committee.
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Elements of Creative Writing
J.D. Schraffenberger; Rachel Morgan; Grant Tracey · University of Northern Iowa · 2025
This free and open access textbook introduces new writers to some basic elements of the craft of creative writing in the genres of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. The authors—Rachel Morgan, Jeremy Schraffenberger, and Grant Tracey—are editors of the North American Review, the oldest and one of the most well-regarded literary magazines in the United States. We've selected nearly all of our readings and examples from writing that has appeared in our pages over the years. This 2nd edition includes several new topics and some new pieces from NAR. Because we had a hand in publishing these pieces originally, our perspective as editors permeates this book. As such, they hope that even seasoned writers might gain insight into the aesthetics of our magazine as we analyze and discuss some reasons this work is so remarkable—and therefore teachable.
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Thinking Rhetorically: Writing for Professional and Public Audiences
Roger Williams University Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition · Roger Williams University Open Publishing · 2020
Thinking Rhetorically: Writing in Professional and Public Contexts is dedicated to introducing students to a lifelong commitment of engaging with these problems that matter. As an academic discipline, Writing Studies’ contribution to engaging with problems can be applied to all areas of study and to all types of problems because we focus on the way language itself—discourse—is created and exchanged in the service of engaging problems. Writing Studies deepens students’ rhetorical awareness of how the ongoing conversations between groups of people shape and express the problems that matter.
![Reading and Writing Successfully in College: A Guide for Students [Revised Edition]](/api/files/covers/otl-1419.webp)
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Reading and Writing Successfully in College: A Guide for Students [Revised Edition]
Patricia Lynne · ROTEL · 2023
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.
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Introduction to College Research
Walter Butler; Aloha Sargent; Kelsey Smith · Academic Senate for California Community Colleges · 2021
This book acknowledges our changing information landscape, covering key concepts in information literacy to support a research process with intention. We start by critically examining the online environment many of us already engage with every day, looking at algorithms, the attention economy, information disorder and cynicism, information hygiene, and fact-checking. We then move into an exploration of information source types, meaningful research topics, keyword choices, effective search strategies, library resources, Web search considerations, the ethical use of information, and citation.
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Supporting English Language Learners in First-Year College Composition
Breana Bayraktar; Elaine George; Nataliya Schetchikova · Virginia's Academic Library Consortium (VIVA) · 2023
Supporting ELLs in FYC is organized around five key essays, selected to coordinate with the essay styles commonly taught in first-year/first-semester composition courses. This organization is planned to offer instructors the flexibility to best support the pacing of the composition course. There are 2 expository, 1 narrative, and 2 argument essays. Each module includes one essay, with accompanying activities and supporting materials. Expository: Sweet, Sour & Resentful Expository: Why Rituals Are Good Narrative: Prison to Professor Argument: Fake News Argument: Misinformation
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Processes: Writing Across Academic Careers
Christopher Iverson; Dan Ehrenfeld · Milne Open Textbooks · 2023
Processes: Writing Across Academic Careers is an edited collection featuring writing from students, faculty, and staff at Farmingdale State College, a State University of New York (SUNY) campus on Long Island. Each contributor reflects on their own writing as well as writing in their fields/disciplines. Namely, they reflect on their writing processes, hence the name of the book. The FSC Writing in the Disciplines committee curated excerpts of published or unpublished work from faculty, students, and administrators across departments and offices. The result is Processes: Writing Across Academic Careers, a collection of writing samples and reflections on the processes that made those pieces of writing possible. This book shows that, while writing looks and functions differently in different disciplines, college communities center on writing. From the college president to the faculty to the students, each member of the community grapples with writing, even in disciplines not considered to be writing-intensive. The text features compositions from nursing, STEM and health sciences, education, and history and culture. The examples span from reflections on the role of writing in one’s academic career, examples of professional writing in the sciences, research papers, conference proposals, to laboratory reports. The examples of published or works-in-progress are accompanied by thoughtful reflections on how the author crafted their work. The collection presents an opportunity for scholars to acknowledge the centrality of writing in their everyday work. Students learning how to write in college and about writing conventions in their specific disciplines will gain an overview of writing they will encounter in their academic career and an appreciation for the multitudes of ways writers work. Perfect for introductory writing courses, and useful modularly for any class that touches on writing or information literacy, this text is a unique, honest, and practical resource for any u