Compose, Design, Advocate, 3rd edition

For courses in First-Year Composition and Rhetoric.

Helping students choose effective strategies, arrangements, and media for different communication contexts

Compose, Design, Advocate is a genre-based writing guide that teaches students how to use both words and images in writing and speaking. This highly teachable text offers a systematic approach for analyzing communication situations, while also providing the concepts and vocabulary to make thoughtful choices. The text integrates instruction in, and samples from, diverse writing genres, and an advocacy chapter that prepares students to use communication to effect change in their lives and communities.

The 3rd Edition introduces new readings, visual samples, and learning outcomes, along with an enhanced focus on multimodality and rhetoric.

Hallmark features of this title

• Students learn to analyze and create across genres (editorials, opinion pieces, research projects, posters, etc.) beginning with rhetorical analysis, reading diverse examples, then composing.
• Research and composing (verbal and visual) are taught as processes, emphasizing audience, purpose, context and design, as well as how to develop a research question.
• Each of the 3 modes (written, visual and oral) gets an in-depth chapter with numerous examples, practice assignments, key vocabulary and concepts.
• An advocacy chapter provides instruction, examples and assignments to help students advocate for change using all 3 modes for “civic” communication.
• “Thinking through production” assignments throughout provide practice composing across genres in all 3 modes.
• Free download: The Pearson Guide to the 2021 MLA Handbook.

New and updated features of this title

• NEW: Multimodality is emphasized in a new chapter that combines the previous 3 on writing, oral presentations, and visual communication, thereby helping students focus on composing with different modes (e.g., students follow the creation of a web page using research developed in earlier chapters).
• REVISED: The text's rhetorical focus is enhanced (addressing feedback from teachers and students) including more sample rhetorical analyses and enhanced discussion of persuasion in chapters 1 and 10-15.
• NEW: Nearly half of the readings and visual samples in chapters 10-15 are all new, paired with the best of the previous editions' selections and new samples of student work are included, as well.
• NEW: Outcomes are clearly tied to coverage to help students pinpoint what they need to succeed. The text also discusses how students are likely to utilize and benefit from the skills tied to each outcome.
• REVISED: Expanded student examples demonstrate how one student carries out research (including developing an annotated bibliography) and then uses that research to draft and revise a written research paper, an oral report with supporting slides, an argumentative photo essay, and a web page.
• NEW: Analyzing and responding to video content are discussed in a new chapter with examples and practice.