About the Book

For courses in English.

Learn the skill of rational argument. Revel (TM) Perspectives on Argument teaches students strategies for critical thinking, critical reading, research, and writing that will help them participate in all types of argument. The 9th Edition extends beyond reading, visual, and multimodal argument into the timely topic of online argument. Students will encounter argument at home, school, and on the job. The authors arm them with the tools they need to identify controversial topics, form opinions and reactions to text and pictures, and write persuasive papers that express their viewpoints. Perspectives on Argument also follows the premise that not all arguments involve right and wrong. Students will learn skills like finding common ground, consensus, withholding opinions, negotiating, and even changing beliefs when they can no longer make a case for them.

Revel is Pearson's newest way of delivering our respected content. Fully digital and highly engaging, Revel replaces the textbook and gives students everything they need for the course. Informed by extensive research on how people read, think, and learn, Revel is an interactive learning environment that enables students to read, practice, and study in one continuous experience-for less than the cost of a traditional textbook.

NOTE: This Revel Combo Access pack includes a Revel access code plus a loose-leaf print reference (delivered by mail) to complement your Revel experience. In addition to this access code, you will need a course invite link, provided by your instructor, to register for and use Revel.

About the Author: Nancy V. Wood, Professor Emerita of English at the University of Texas at Arlington, taught courses in rhetoric and composition, American literature, and Milton and also served as Director of First Year English, Department Chair, and Assistant Vice President of Undergraduate Academic and Student Affairs. She created the training program for the graduate teaching assistants who teach the freshman argument classes at the university. Perspectives on Argument, developed in the context of this program, underwent constant classroom testing of both content and classroom activities. Other argument textbooks of the time tended to present issues as having only two sides, pro and con, with the possibility of one side "winning." Perspectives on Argument took a different approach by suggesting that issues may invite a variety of perspectives and that common ground and eventual consensus are also possible outcomes.

Much of Wood's academic career focused on what freshman students need to become successful college students. While a graduate student in English at Cornell University, Wood taught study skills to Cornell students. Later at the University of Texas at El Paso she created the Study Skills and Tutorial Services, a university-wide program that provided academic support to 12,000 students a year.

Wood is also the author of Essentials of Argument, Writing Argumentative Essays, and College Reading: Purposes and Strategies (Prentice/Pearson).

James Miller is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where he teaches courses in 20^th century American literature, digital rhetoric, and composition. His scholarship focuses on issues of public memory and the formation of middle-class identity in twentieth-century America, as well as the role commodity culture plays in shaping historical consciousness. His published work has appeared in such journals as American Studies, The Journal of American Folklore, and The Public Historian. In addition to Perspectives on Argument, Professor Miller is the author of several other rhetorical studies and argument readers, among them, The Eater Reader (Pearson).