What’s in LaunchPad for The St. Martin's Guide to Writing, 12th Edition?

LaunchPad for The St. Martin's Guide to Writing, 12th Edition is packed with digital content that works with your textbook to help you sharpen your ability to read analytically and write successfully in first-year composition and in your coursework across campus. Whether your instructor assigns the resources in LaunchPad or encourages you to work with the material at your own pace, we’re confident that LaunchPad will help you develop the skills you need to succeed in college and beyond. For help using LaunchPad, please explore the College Students Support CommunityWill be opened in a new tab. or contact Tech Support. You can find Tech Support contact information by clicking “Help” in the upper right corner of your LaunchPad home screen.

E-book

In the e-book you’ll find all the great content and activities from the printed book, including:

An all-in-one, thorough, and flexible approach to teaching and composing. The St. Martin’s Guide provides a complete first-year composition class in a single book, with a rhetoric, engaging reading selections—including 28 professional essays and 13 student essays—and a research manual.

Practical, classroom-tested Guides to Writing. Based on class-tested, research-informed pedagogy, each of the Guides to Writing emphasizes the basic features of a piece of writing so that students internalize a systematic yet flexible approach to the composing process that can be transferred to any writing situation.

Sustained attention to critical reading. The Guides to Reading help students hone their ability to read like a writer, with activities following each of the professional reading selections that ask students to reflect, analyze, and respond.

Thorough coverage of argumentation. Five assignment chapters ask students to argue for a position, a solution, an evaluation, an interpretation, and a cause. The streamlined Chapter 5 shows students how to build a convincing argument by analyzing competing viewpoints and synthesizing ideas across selections. It offers excellent preparation for students to understand an issue before adopting and arguing for positions of their own.

Hands-on activities and strategies for diverse writing and research situations. Practical strategies for critical thinking, reading, and writing reinforce coverage in the genre chapters as needed. Writing strategies—from “Cueing the Reader” to using the modes—allow students and instructors to dip in for more help as needed. In-depth coverage of research, including how to cite sources in MLA and APA styles, appears in Chapters 17-21. Later chapters offer composing strategies for college and beyond, with a new chapter on analyzing and composing multimodal texts, and chapters on taking essay exams, creating a portfolio, writing in business and scientific genres, writing for and about the community, and writing collaboratively.

Additional content and tutorials

Additional student essays from Sticks and Stones: And Other Student Essays, 10th Edition reflect the richness and diversity of the student experience. These essays, written by students using The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing, showcase the quantity and quality of student writing.

The new Student’s Companion for The St. Martin’s Guide to Writing is designed for students who need a little extra help to write successfully on the college level. The text includes material for student success, including coverage of time management, academic planning, and beating test anxiety; even more activities to help students develop thoughtful, college-level essays, including assessment rubrics for every writing assignment in the text; and additional resources, such as sentence templates for academic writers and practice editing common issues student writers face, from boundary issues (sentence fragments, comma splices, and run-ons) to grammatical issues (problems with pronouns, agreement, and modifier placement) to stylistic issues (problems with wordiness, parallelism, and diction).

In addition, you’ll find helpful tutorials on topics such as reading critically, working with and citing sources, and using digital writing tools.

LearningCurve

Developed in light of the latest advances in learning research, LearningCurve is a game-like adaptive quizzing program that covers topics from grammar and usage to reading critically and argument. The less you know about a topic, the more LearningCurve focuses on it, and the better you do, the more challenging the questions become, helping you concentrate on exactly what you need to learn.