How did humans develop the ability to communicate? Are humans the only creatures on earth that communicate? What purpose does communication serve in our lives? Answers to these historical, anthropological, and social-scientific questions provide part of the diversity of knowledge that makes up the field of communication studies.

The course is an introduction to the preparation and delivery of oral presentations in an extemporaneous style. Emphasis is on ethical research, critical and logical analysis, and organization of informative and persuasive presentations.

A Common Approach to Work-place Writing

Short Description:
This open textbook is designed to support the learning outcomes of Fanshawe College’s first-year Common Communications curriculum and is designed to guide college students in developing the vital communication skills that will help with the real, everyday tasks of writing and speaking in their chosen profession.

Long Description:
This open textbook is designed to support the learning outcomes of Fanshawe College’s first-year Common Communications curriculum and is designed to guide college students in developing the vital communication skills that will help with the real, everyday tasks of writing and speaking in their chosen profession. Organized in five major units— Communication Foundations, Professional Writing Processes, Routine Workplace Communication, Employment and Interpersonal Communication, and Presentations and Group Communication —this opened educational resource is conveniently presented in a variety of AODA-compliant formats and written in the reader-friendly style. Structured around the learning outcomes of Fanshawe’s first-year communications courses, this textbook helps ensure that students graduate with the communication skills necessary to succeed in the modern workplace.

Word Count: 221786

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Professional business communication is essential to the success of any corporation. This could include writing memos, reports, or proposals. Small businesses all the way up to corporations can benefit from professional and technical communication.

Short Description:
Book review publications (Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly) and social cataloguing websites (GoodReads, LibraryThing) categorize the books they review into genres. Fiction and Nonfiction are the broadest categories. The more specialized categories include Mystery, Children's Books, and Poetry. This public domain anthology includes a range of books in these various genres for novice critics to practice the reviewer's craft.

Long Description:
Well-regarded book review publications (Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly) and popular social cataloguing websites (GoodReads, LibraryThing) categorize the books they review into genres. Fiction and Nonfiction are the broadest categories. Specialized categories include Mysteries, Children’s Books, and Poetry. Of course, even these sub-genres of Fiction and Nonfiction go by different labels. For example, “Mystery” books at Kirkus Reviews are labeled Mystery and Detective. Publishers Weekly and GoodReads uses the label Mystery and Thriller. This public domain anthology, while open to expansion to include additional genres, such as science fiction or biography and memoir, provides a rich and varied collection of works for novice book critics to develop their skills as reviewers.

Word Count: 641425

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Introduction to Public Speaking is a former title of this text, which is widely referenced across the Communications education OER world. Formerly at publicspeakingproject.org.

This short work of fiction has been one of Johnson’s most popular and widely-read since its first, anonymous publication in 1759. It has been reprinted again and again over the last two and a half centuries. It seems a fair guess that over that time more people have read this book than have read any of Johnson’s other works, with the possible exception of the Dictionary of the English Language (1755); even there, very few will have read the Dictionary from cover to cover in the way that readers are invited to enjoy this short and very readable work. Originally called by Johnson “The Choice of Life,” it was first published as The Prince of Abissinia. Today, this book is better known as Rasselas; the evolution of the title is a story of its own, which will be discussed later in this introduction.

This wiki contains materials for teaching RWS 100 and 200. It supports the work carried out in the RWS teaching internship (RWS 796A) for new TAs. We will use it to share and discuss resources for teaching, pedagogy, and professional development. You are also invited to use it to share work, draft teaching materials, add links, think out loud, introduce yourself, etc.

This textbook provides students with guidelines for understanding writing tasks as intellectual work using Bloom’s Taxonomy and for treating the writing process as a set of variable activities that move along a trajectory from idea or assignment to a finished product. The book also includes chapters on strengthening reading strategies and on finding, evaluating, and using sources effectively.

This text is an Open Educational Resource (OER), responding to the growing movement for Zero Cost Course Materials at SFSU, and the need to lower the costs of higher education in any way we can to provide equity and inclusion for everyone regardless of socioeconomic privilege. In addition, as an OER, this text is available far beyond one course and adaptable to students’ needs throughout their careers.

To minimize cost and maximize new learning technologies, while being mindful of various learning styles and individual needs, we have integrated various modalities and reading practices through our text, including lots of visual images and video, as well as links to external digital resources.

To make reading engaging, this text provides short writing prompts as you read – using the hypothes.is extension to annotate your responses – in order to frame reading and writing as a conversation that sometimes starts with the authors’ ideas — but importantly always involves your own ideas as well as you create meaning through the reading process. Get Started with your free hypothes.is account to annotate this text and any other open source on the web.

Rhetoric Matters: A Guide to Success in the First Year Writing Class offers students necessary concepts and practice to learn all the elements needed for successful first year writing and set the stage for future writing success in college.
Chapter 1: The Introduction
Chapter 2: Reading in Writing Class
Chapter 3: Thinking and Analyzing Rhetorically
Chapter 4: Writing a Summary and Synthesizing
Chapter 5: The Writing Process
Chapter 6: Structuring, Paragraphing, and Styling
Chapter 7: Revising and Refining
Chapter 8: Multimodal Reading and Visual Rhetoric
Chapter 9: The Research Process
Chapter 10: Sources and Research
Chapter 11: Ethical Source Integration: Citation, Quoting, and Paraphrasing
Chapter 12: Documentation Styles: MLA and APA

Designed for use as a textbook in first-year college composition programs, written as a practical guide for students struggling to bring their writing up to the level expected of them by their professors and instructors.

The first in a two-volume set, A Rhetoric of Literate Action is written for "the experienced writer with a substantial repertoire of skills, [who] now would find it useful to think in more fundamental strategic terms about what they want their texts to accomplish, what form the texts might take, how to develop specific contents, and how to arrange the work of writing." The reader is offered a framework for identifying and understanding the situations writing comes out of and is directed toward; a consideration of how a text works to transform a situation and achieve the writer's motives; and advice on how to bring the text to completion and "how to manage the work and one's own emotions and energies so as to accomplish the work most effectively."

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is one of those books that we all know even if we have never read it. With his first work of fiction, Daniel Defoe–a businessman turned poet, journalist, and political propagandist–created a character who very quickly went on to have a life that went well beyond the pages of the book that first appeared, without build-up, fanfare, or even the author’s name on the title page, in April 1719. Robinson Crusoe was an immediate bestseller; the bookseller went through several editions in the first year alone. By August, Defoe had produced a sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a work that he wrote quickly in part to head off the possibility that someone else might beat him to it. Over the last three hundred years, the story of a person isolated on a deserted island or something like it, has been used by dozens, maybe hundreds of writers, who have made it a genre of its own, the “Robinsoniad,” a genre that includes satirical parodies like Gulliver’s Travels, children’s books like The Swiss Family Robinson, Bugs Bunny cartoons, television situation comedies like Gilligan’s Island, and science fiction works like The Martian. Robinson Crusoe, the man and the book in which he first appeared, has become one of the foundational myths of the modern world.The story of one man’s survival has become so well known in all of these instances that it can be difficult to see through the mythology to analyze Defoe’s original book and to imagine what its first readers might have noticed and found so striking. It is important to recognize, for example, that the book is told in the first person, by a narrator who never lets on that this is a work of fiction. Defoe’s name, as noted above, did not appear on the title page of the first edition (although it quickly became clear to those in the know that he was the author), or even in any of the many editions issued in his lifetime. Although the book is famous for the many years that Crusoe spends on the island, it takes a while for him to get there, and his experiences both before and after his time there are worth paying attention to for the way that they frame the central experience. Defoe’s prose is sometimes clunky-he has a tendency to shape sentences and paragraphs that would never pass muster with a modern copyeditor–but it is also capable of great beauty and insight, and rewards careful attention.

A Textbook Edition of Shakespeare’s Play Created By Students, For Students

Short Description:
This edition of Romeo and Juliet was edited by students for students. We believe that reliably edited versions of the play should be available for free online. But we wanted ours to be easy to get in other ways as well. The editors—Oregon State University students who remember, far better than their professors, what it was like to read the play for the first time—carefully considered every pronoun, punctuation mark, and footnote. Our goal: to make a friendly, confidence-building edition that supported classroom activities at the high school and college level. Data dashboard

Word Count: 50242

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Short Description:
This is a series of 5 capstone lessons based on 5 interviews. Topics of the lesson are: Sergei Khrushchev (about the historical legacy of his father, Nikita Khrushchev), Sergei Enikolopov (crime), Viktor Loshak (journalism), Evgenii Aksenov (business), and Aleksandr Asmolov (education).

Long Description:
This is a series of 5 capstone lessons based on 5 interviews. Topics of the lesson are: Sergei Khrushchev (about the historical legacy of his father, Nikita Khrushchev), Sergei Enikolopov (crime), Viktor Loshak (journalism), Evgenii Aksenov (business), and Aleksandr Asmolov (education).

Authors: Nina Familiant, Shannon Donnally Quinn, Benjamin Rifkin

New version created by: Shannon Donnally Quinn with help from Lidia Gault

Word Count: 4544

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Short Description:
This is a series of 9 lessons based on films "Solovky Power" and "The Children of Ivan Kuzmich" and interviews by filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya. Topics of the lessons are: The director of the films, About the camp, Heroes, Life in the camp and after, About the film Solovky Power, The country and Stalinism, School 110, Parents and children, Adult life.

Long Description:
This is a series of 9 lessons based on films “Solovky Power” and “The Children of Ivan Kuzmich” and interviews by filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya. Topics of the lessons are: The director of the films, About the camp, Heroes, Life in the camp and after, About the film Solovky Power, The country and Stalinism, School 110, Parents and children, Adult life.

Authors: Victoria Thorstensson, Shannon Donnally Quinn, Benjamin Rifkin, Dianna Murphy

New version created by: Shannon Donnally Quinn and Isabella Palange with help from Lidia Gault

Use of excerpts from the films Solovky Power and Children of Ivan Kuzmich in the RAILS lessons is courtesy of Goldfilms.

Word Count: 17139

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Short Description:
This resource is aimed at demystifying some important uses of imperfective verbs for learners of Russian at the intermediate level and above. It focuses on patterns of imperfective usage in infinitives, imperatives and the past tense that involve single completed actions and that are difficult for foreign learners to grasp.

Long Description:
Russian aspect is complex in all of its dimensions—verbs are marked for aspect by an array of prefixes and suffixes, and the usage of perfective and imperfective verbs can be mysterious even for those who have learned Russian for years. Russian Aspect in Conversation is aimed at demystifying some important uses of imperfective verbs for learners of Russian at the intermediate level and above. It focuses on patterns of imperfective usage in infinitives, imperatives and the past tense that involve single completed actions and that are difficult for foreign learners to grasp. Each of the core modules consists of an introductory exercise, followed by more passive exercises focusing on interpretations of aspectual forms and then active exercise in which the student must choose the correct aspect in a context. The language material consists almost exclusively of conversational dialogues based on attestations in the Russian National Corpus and Russian fiction, films and online content, which utilize verbs typical of most intermediate- and advanced-level Russian textbooks.

Word Count: 45824

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Open syllabus for an introduction to co-cultural communication course. Includes open source or free videos and readings, assignments, and assessment.