Helps students discover and refine their own writing processes

The Mosaics series illustrates how reading and writing are part of an interrelated process, and builds students’ confidence as it transitions them from personal writing to more academic writing. Acclaimed author Kim Flachmann demonstrates how these skills are integrated at every stage of communication, and encourages students to discover how the “mosaics” of their own reading and writing processes work together to form a coherent whole. By exploring the relationship among thinking, reading, and writing on progressively more difficult levels, the series helps prepare students for success in college throughout the curriculum and in their lives after graduation.

Each of the three books of the Mosaics series has a different emphasis: Sentences, Paragraphs, and Essays. Mosaics: Reading and Writing Essays increases the level of sophistication in the length and level of reading selections, the complexity of writing assignments, the degree of difficulty in revising and editing strategies, and the content and structure of student writing samples.

* The 8th Edition introduces sweeping changes to the philosophy and details of MLA works cited entries. Responding to the “increasing mobility of texts,” MLA now encourages writers to focus on the process of crafting the citation, beginning with the same questions for any source. These changes, then, align with current best practices in the teaching of writing which privilege inquiry and critical thinking over rote recall and rule-following.

Kim Flachmann teaches at the California State University, Bakersfield, where she also administers the Composition Program—from remedial English through the Graduate Teaching Assistants. She was chosen Outstanding Professor at CSUB in 1998-99. She also was Rhetorician of the Year for the Young Rhetoricians’ Conference in 2007 and was the recipient of the California Association of Teachers of English Excellence in Teaching Award in 2009. She has published numerous articles on rhetoric and American literature and has written seven textbooks—among them a college reader ( The Prose Reader  in its eleventh edition), a series of three books for developmental English called  Mosaics: Reading  and Writing Sentences ,  Mosaics: Reading and Writing  Paragraphs , and  Mosaics: Reading and Writing Essays , and  Nexus: A Rhetorical Reader for Writers , which combines traditional rhetorical modes with students’ interest in technology.