Writing about American Literature

Writing About American Literature, the latest addition to Karen Gocsik's popular "Writing About" series, is an accessible, step-by-step guide to writing about literature, from active reading to final revisions. The only writing guide created with American literature students in mind, this new text understands that active reading is the first step towards producing quality assignments and sections devoted to reading analytically and interrogating sources provide students with this essential foundation. Tips on reading critically and creatively, generating ideas, narrowing a topic, constructing a thesis, structuring an argument, and revising lead students through the entire arc of the writing process.

Karen Gocsik is director of the Warren College Writing Program at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches first-year composition and a graduate-level training course for the program's teaching assistants. Professor Gocsik previously taught first-year writing at Dartmouth College, where she was also Executive Director of the Writing & Rhetoric Program. In 2012, Professor Gocsik was nationally recognized by The Princeton Review as one of the "300 Best Professors in America."