Writing Places, 2nd edition

Part of the Longman Topics reader series, Writing Places encourages students to examine the locations that define their past, present and future. As students begin to think critically and to write about these places, they realize that location is an enormous part of identity — both personally and academically.

This collection of readings offers a poignant and, oftentimes, moving variety of essays from writers of all ages, styles, and backgrounds. It is designed to be flexible to any teaching method and any composition class. The text is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is an introduction for both instructors and students to the concept of writing about place. The middle two chapters divide the essays by the period of time represented in the author’s work. The last chapter provides valuable instruction from start to finish for wiriting about place. It focuses specifically on how to better understand the meaning of place in life and writing. 

“Longman Topics” are brief, attractive readers on a single, complex, but compelling topic. Featuring about 30 full-length selections, these volumes are generally half the size and half the cost of standard composition readers.

• Half the size and cost of typical readers. "Longman Topics" can be used alone or paired with other texts.
• Twenty-six essays, written by a variety of writers, from professionals to community members to college students.
• Critical writing skills are tested and improved through listening, interviewing, researching, andn other means of gathering information.
• "Tools for Getting Places" offers activities designed to inform studdents of the wide variety of methods available for observing places.
• Each reading offers questions and activities to encourage students to explore those places familiar to them, as well as those that are new.

What’s New in the Second Edition. . . .     

Writing Places continues to strike a unique balance among professional, student, and community writers who explore a variety of places from unique perspectives.  But in this edition, we have added several new essays from professional authors–like Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz, and media specialist Craig S. Watkins–and introduce exciting new student essays.  Our new content includes the following:

Where Are We From?                                                           

• Mobility: Kathryn Carey, a University of Michigan undergraduate, describes in her essay her attempts to negotiate the cultural differences between the Upper and Lower Peninsulas in Michigan (“Say yah to da U.P., eh?”).
• Questioning Mobility: “The Most Radical Thing You Can Do” by Rebecca Solnit explores the radical concept of staying put, and how and why that isn’t an option for many groups of people.

Where Are We?         

• Food Politics: “The Effects of Fast Food Restaurants on the Caribbean People” by Alayne Brown explores this student writer’s Caribbean heritage and examines the dramatic shifts taking place in the diets of Caribbean people influenced by Western food supplies.
• Shifting Populations: “Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field,” a New York Times feature by Warren St. John, explores the racial and community struggles facing a refugee community in Clarkston, Georgia.

Where Are We Going?                      

• Natural Disasters: “Apocalypse” by Junot Diaz thoughtfully explores the social causes and reverberations of Haiti’s devastating earthquake and provokes readers to become apocalyptic thinkers.
• Social Media: In “Social Movements in the Age of Social Media: Participatory Politics in Egypt,” S. Craig Watkins writes about the evolving role of Twitter, Facebook, and other media in global politics.
• Evolving Cities and Towns: In his essay “Borderland/Borderama/Detroit,” Jerry Herron explores the past, present, and future of a struggling city. In Jonathan Lerner’s “How Urban Planning Can Improve Public Health,” he urges planners to (re)create cities that promote healthy and sustainable living.In “Elm City” student writer Kevin Savage explores his family’s role in a small central-Illinois town, as his family and the town itself have changed over the years.

The  updates allows readers and writers to explore new places and to bring new questions to the places we all explore. 

The unique Tools for Getting Places chapter includes several new “Tools for Exploring” that reflect shifts in number of online and mobile tools that have exploded in the last five years: Mobile Apps, Networked Scavenger Hunts, Hyperlocal News and Blogging, Citizen Science, Maps and Geographic Data.