Showing posts with label grad school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grad school. Show all posts

Buy Cheap "They Say / I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing with Readings Review

They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing with Readings

Are you looking to buy "They Say / I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing with Readings? here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on "They Say / I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing with Readings. check out the link below:

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"They Say / I Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing with Readings Review

Even as a writer, writing teacher, and rhetorician, I could not see how many gaps I left in my writing until this book. So much of the writing process was just flung at me in public school that I was fortunate to absorb dribs and drabs. Graff, Birkenstein, and Durst dismantle writing into a system, based on the most recent rhetorical research, and lay the process out in short chapters, plain language, and a scheme of templates that students can use to kick-start their own writing.
The authors' thesis is that writing is an uncomplicated process which can be reduced to a handful of rhetorical components. If students see writing as a social act, joining a larger conversation already in process, they will produce engaging writing which both they and their teachers will enjoy. Since the book is laced with examples of effective and ineffective writing, there is no doubt as to which the authors aim for, making evaluation a simple, somewhat objective process.
This book seeks to be accessible to a mass audience. It's written in vernacular English, using examples from current culture and respected print sources. It is so straightforward that teachers can use it at multiple levels, from advanced middle school up through college composition. It's so explicit that it could even be used without a teacher, with only a writing group or college writing center to fill in the role of hands-on assistance with individual problems.
This "With Readings" edition contains the full text of Graff and Birkenstein's original short primer of the same title. The original is less than 150 pages and can be digested in small segments by teachers and students alike. This edition contains over 250 pages of articles from respected print and online publications to guide students into the larger writerly discourse. Selected authors include George Will, Thomas Friedman, Eric Schlosser, and Barack Obama.
My only regret is that I did not receive this book sooner. My teaching career up to this point would have been both easier and more productive if I had enjoyed this text, which simply states everything I wanted to say. Both teachers and students often make writing a more difficult process than it needs to be, but this book strips the mystification away and makes classroom writing as easy and clear-cut as the conversations students already have.

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34% Off Discounts: Best Price Good to Great CD: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't Review

Good to Great CD: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't

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Good to Great CD: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't Review

This book by Jim Collins is one of the most successful books to be found in the "Business" section of your local megabookstore, and given how it purports to tell you how to take a merely good company and make it great, it's not difficult to see why that might be so. Collins and his crack team of researchers say they swam through stacks of business literature in search of info on how to pull this feat off, and came up with a list of great companies that illustrate some concepts central to the puzzle. They also present for each great company what they call a "comparison company," which is kind of that company with a goatee and a much less impressive earnings record. The balance of the book is spent expanding on pithy catch phrases that describe the great companies, like "First Who, Then What" or "Be a Hedgehog" or "Grasp the Flywheel, not the Doom Loop." No, no, I'm totally serious.
I've got several problems with this book, the biggest of which stem from fundamentally viewpoints on how to do research. Collin's brand of research is not my kind. It's not systematic, it's not replicable, it's not generalizable, it's not systematic, it's not free of bias, it's not model driven, and it's not collaborative. It's not, in short, scientific in any way. That's not to say that other methods of inquiry are without merit --the Harvard Business Review makes pretty darn good use of case studies, for example-- but way too often Collins's great truths seemed like square pegs crammed into round holes, because a round hole is what he wants. For example, there's no reported search for information that disconfirms his hypotheses. Are there other companies that don't make use of a Culture of Discipline (Chapter 6, natch) but yet are still great according to Collins's definition? Are there great companies that fail to do some of the things he says should make them great? The way that the book focuses strictly on pairs of great/comparison companies smacks of confirmatory information bias, which is a kink in the human mind that drives us to seek out and pay attention to information that confirms our pre-existing suppositions and ignore information that fails to support them.
Relatedly, a lot of the book's themes and platitudes strike me as owing their popularity to the same factors that make the horoscope or certain personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator so popular: they're so general and loosely defined that almost anyone can look at that and not only say that wow, that make sense, and I've always felt the same way! This guy and me? We're geniuses! The chapter about "getting the right people on the bus" that extols the virtue of hiring really super people is perhaps the most obvious example. Really, did anyone read this part and think "Oh, man. I've been hiring half retarded chimps. THAT'S my problem! I should hire GOOD people!" Probably not, and given that Collins doesn't go into any detail about HOW to do this or any of his other good to great pro tips, I'm not really sure where the value is supposed to be.
It also irked me that Good to Great seems to try and exist in a vacuum, failing to relate its findings to any other body of research except Collins's other book, Built to Last. The most egregious example of this is early on in Chapter 2 where Collins talks about his concept of "Level 5 Leadership," which characterizes those very special folks who perch atop a supposed leadership hierarchy. The author actually goes into some detail describing Level 5 leaders, but toward the end of the chapter he just shrugs his figurative shoulders and says "But we don't know how people get to be better leaders. Some people just are." Wait, what? People in fields like Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Development have been studying, scientifically, what great leaders do and how to do it for decades. We know TONS about how to become a better leader. There are entire industries built around it. You would think that somebody on the Good to Great research team may have done a cursory Google search on this.
So while Good to Great does have some interesting thoughts and a handful of amusing or even fascinating stories to tell about the companies it profiles (I liked, for example, learning about why Walgreens opens so many shops in the same area, even to the point of having stores across the street from each other in some cities), ultimately it strikes me as vague generalities and little to no practical information about how to actually DO anything to make your company great.

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