Dr. Philip C. Kolin, University Distinguished Professor of English in the College of Arts and Letters, recently had the 10thedition of his widely used Successful Writing at Work published through Cengage/Wadsworth, a leading textbook publisher.
For more than three decades Kolin’s Successful Writing at Work has been one of the leading texts in the field. Keeping up with the latest research in business and technical communication has made Kolin’s book valuable for instructors and students alike. The book is praised by both teachers and students for its easy-to-read style, up-to-date guidelines and real-world examples.
“The 10thedition was vetted by eight outside reviewers representing a cross-section of instructors who teach business and technical writing across the country,” Kolin said. “Add to them the four Cengage editors I worked with to make the 10th edition current and relevant.”
Containing about 150 pages of new material, the current edition is the most heavily revised and expanded edition to date. “The first edition came in under 300 pages,” Kolin said. “The 10th edition is nearly 800 pages.”
The 10thedition offers new and expanded coverage of ethics and professional writing, collaborative writing and editing, designing print and web documents, writing for international readers, preparing proposals and reports and incorporating the latest communication technologies such as track editing and Skype.
“The new edition also offers students more case studies than ever before, helping them understand the rhetorical, ethical, and practical contexts in which a document is planned, drafted, written, revised and formatted,” Kolin said.
Every document in the 10thedition – from emails to letters to blogs to employee activity reports to instructions to reports – is annotated to help students better understand how to research, organize, format, write, document and format information.
The new edition also contains many more case studies, tech notes, enhanced graphics and a new feature—boxed commentaries entitled “Advice from a Pro,” dealing with everything from e-communication and online collaboration to sharing resources to writing a technical proposal to designing company newsletters.
Also new to this edition is Kolin’s emphasis on using social/professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, to find a job and advance professionally. Unlike other technical writing textbooks, Kolin’s includes an actual LinkedIn profile along with guidelines on what to and what not to include on social/professional sites.
A chapter on searching for a job featuring resumes, portfolios, letters of application, interview strategies has been praised by instructors and students. Professor Leslie St. Martin, College of the Canyons, said this chapter “is any student’s one-stop job search shop.”
Visually, the 10th edition features a four-color palette in every chapter making material easier to find, read, and refer to. This four color palette exemplifies the wide range of professional designs and layout choices that writers make in the world of work.
An international authority on the plays of Tennessee Williams and general editor of the Routledge Shakespeare Criticism series, Kolin was one of the first instructors to teach English 333 Technical Writing when the course was first offered at Southern Miss in 1975. He is the first Charles W. Moorman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Southern Miss (1991-93) and has been a member of the university’s faculty since 1974.
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