Essay Writing for Canadian Students, 10th edition

For courses in English composition.

In writing Essay Writing for Canadian Students, our primary goal was to create a resource for Canadian students that offers a fresh and unique approach to essay writing: one that is clear, concise, accessible, and inclusive. In this way, we sought to create an indispensable tool for students from diverse academic backgrounds. We believe that essay writing is a skill you can learn, rather than an inert talent. With this idea in mind, we are convinced that our systematic method - one that explains the stages and steps of the essay writing process - will work for most writers. If you are trying to figure out how to cope with essay assignments in your college or university courses, you are the student we had in mind when we wrote this book.

We present the writing process as a systematic set of procedures for planning, drafting, and revising deductively organized academic essays. Our text aims to demystify the essay writing process and empower every student to cultivate their writing skills. As educators, we have found that students sometimes struggle with thinking about the content of the assignment. For this reason, we stress the analytical skills that help students explore the subjects they write about more completely. We believe there is value in an approach that encourages critical thinking, and that creativity can be incorporated into structured writing of any kind.

Hallmark features of this title

• Analytical Skills. We present the writing process as a systematic set of procedures for planning, drafting, and revising deductively organized academic essays. Like most teachers, we have found that many weaknesses in student writing stem from confused thinking about the assignment, the subject of the essay, or both.
• We present a systematic approach to writing essays. Because we believe that writing is a skill you can learn, rather than a talent you are born with, we are convinced this method will work for most writers. Feel free to adapt it to suit your needs.

New to this Edition

• Research chapters have been updated to include more current examples in Indigenous research, using a sample topic based on Thomas King. This is a representative example of wholesale changes to many cases throughout the text to have greater consistency with more inclusive language and broader representations of different cultures. For example, many of the grammatical exercises have been edited or changed in an attempt to minimize unconscious bias and to include updated information on gendered language and pronouns.
• Nine new readings have been added to this edition, which mostly include pieces from historically underrepresented groups. These readings aspire to generate conversations around relevant topics both in general culture and academic environments. For example, Wayde Compton’s essay shows how language and race intersect through a grammatical construction called “passive voice” that enables unequal power dynamics to continue unchallenged.
• Added information on “joining the conversation” within academic classes and communities to help students clarify their roles and responsibilities during their learning experiences. Students can come from diverse backgrounds with different understandings of expectations, and this section aims to help students navigate new learning environments. As always, it is important to communicate with instructors to clarify the context(s) in any given course.