Student Resources

Your instructor may assign various activities from each chapter, and you can email your responses to him or her. At the same time, you may decide on your own that many of these resources and exercise are important to your learning whether your instructor assigns them or not. In that case, you can email your responses to yourself and keep them as part of your writer's notebook for the course, or even use them for assignments in other courses when you have to write a proposal, for example, a research essay, or an argument. Ideally, what you learn in The Curious Writer will give you strategies for all the writing and reading you will do in college.

You'll want to keep your copy of The Curious Writer nearby as you do these online activities. Many of them refer to specific pages in the textbook, specific readings, or specific exercises. You will also be asked to do quite a bit of writing online, writing you'll want to keep in your writer's notebook to refer to later. Here are two options for saving your work:

Instead of writing directly into the text boxes here, on the Companion Website, write your responses in your word processing program, save them on your computer, and then copy and paste them into the appropriate text boxes online.

OR

After you've responded online in the text boxes—but before you submit them—copy and paste them from the text box into your word processing program on your computer.

So how does this section work? It's organized by the chapters in The Curious Writer, so as you work, for example, on Chapter 4: Writing the Personal Essay, you'll click on that chapter here and find a summary of what you will learn, writing activities and quizzes that help you practice and test your understanding of the chapter's concepts, Internet resources, workshop suggestions, and opportunities for visual analysis. More specifically, each chapter on the Companion Website contains the following sections:

• Chapter Overview
  This section summarizes each chapter and outlines the key principles and practical strategies that students will learn. You can consult this section before you read the textbook chapter, after you read it, and/or before you do some of the activities on the website. If you notice something on this overview you were supposed to learn but didn't, review the textbook chapter and go to the relevant exercises on the website.
• Quizzes
  The quizzes here assess your understanding of the key concepts in the chapter, providing another opportunity for you to return to the textbook, as needed, to learn the principles and strategies you may be struggling with.
• Writing Exercises
  The exercises here include a few from the textbook and a large number of new activities that help you brainstorm and develop ideas for essays, further analyze the published essays in the book, and practice inquiry-based learning.
• Visual Analysis
  Here you'll find websites and visual material to respond to while applying chapter concepts, as well as research tools.
• Writing Samples
  This section includes sample essays by students, as well as student responses to activities where appropriate.
• Workshop Guidelines
  When you are ready to workshop your drafts, you'll find in this section helpful questions, guidelines, and tips to use when responding to peers' drafts in workshop.
• Reflection on Inquiry
  This section contains exercises and links that invite you to reflect on your learning process as well as develop more strategies for using inquiry in a number of contexts.