The student resources section of the Companion Website offers numerous materials to help you understand, connect and further explore the readings in Writing Material. Some pages offer additional activities and web-links for Readings, some offer additional ways of thinking about and researching the Suggested Groupings, and some direct you to additional resources on reading and writing and on the topics found in the book. The materials are organized as follows:

• Readings. For each reading we provide links to at least three “Web Destinations,” Web sites that contain background information about the author, information about people or things mentioned in the readings, reviews and responses to the reading and other supplementary materials. We also include one “Web Activity” that asks a question about the reading raised by a related Web site.
• Groupings. For each of the seven Suggested Groupings in the book, we include three to five additional questions and writing assignments. We also provide Web destinations relevant to the grouping’s topics and themes, as well as links to resources on common writing issues.
• General Resources. The numerous General Resources links are divided into five categories: Topical, Reading and Writing, Research and Information Literacy, Critical Reading, and Visual Literacy. The topical resources will direct you to a range of materials on the history of writing, new media, and the various themes of the Suggested Groupings. These links may be helpful if your course integrates outside research. The other sections offer various links that will help your critical reading, writing, researching, and visual literacy skills.

To begin select a reading from the pull-down menu above, or select a grouping topic.

• READINGS
• Nicholson Baker, "Deadline"
• Dennis Baron, "From Pencils to Pixels: . . .
• Naomi Baron, "The Art and Science of . . .
• Sven Birkerts, "Into the Electronic . . .
• Jay David Bolter, "The New Dialogue"
• Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of . . .
• Frederick Douglass, from . . .
• Paul Duguid and John Seely Brown, "The . . .
• Elizabeth Eisenstein, "Some Features of
• Peter Elbow, "The Shifting . . .
• Benjamin Franklin, from The . . .
• William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic"
• George Gissing, from New . . .
• Adam Gopnik, "The Return of the Word"
• E.D. Hirsch, "You Can Always Look It Up
• Homer, from Iliad
• Steven Johnson, "Links"
• George Landow, "Twenty Minutes into the
• Wendy Lesser, "The Conversion"
• Toby Lester, "New-Alphabet Disease?"
• Malcolm X, from Autobiography . . .
• Alberto Manguel, "The Shape of the . . .
• Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the . . .
• Melanie Stewart Millar, "Filling the . . .
• Janet H. Murray, from Hamlet . . .
• Walter Ong, "Writing Is a Technology . . .
• On Women and Reading: Three Paintings
• Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, "The Work of the
• Ian Parker, "Absolute PowerPoint"
• Plato, from Phaedrus
• Roy Porter, "Reading Is Bad for Your . . .
• Reading Screens: Word Processing and . . .
• Howard Rheingold, "Look Who's Talking"
• Paul Roberts, "Virtual Grub Street: . . .
• James Sosnoski, "Hyper-readers and . . .
• Mitchell Stephens, "Complex Seeing: A . . .
• Sundiata: Two Versions of an Oral Tale
• Cass Sunstein, "Fragmentation and . . .
• Johannes Trithemius, from In . . .
• Sherry Turkle, "Virtuality and Its . . .
• Mark Twain, "The First . . .
• GROUPINGS
• Suggested Grouping 1: Ways of Writing: . . .
• Suggested Grouping 2: Composing . . .
• Suggested Grouping 3: Ways of Reading: . . .
• Suggested Grouping 4: Cyberculture
• Suggested Grouping 5: Transitional . . .
• Suggested Grouping 6: The Spoken Word . . .
• Suggested Grouping 7: Informing the . . .
• General Resources