The revolutionary approach of D.J. Henry’s Writing for Life offers a visually rich, high-interest, and down-to-earth approach that reinforces the writing process while showing students how to take responsibility for their learning.
 
While the areas-for-learning are often steadfast, today’s developing writers learn differently than learners from 10, 15, 20 years ago. The overwhelming majority of today’s learners—having been influenced by television, interacted with the Web, and watched video games—are products of an environment where information is presented and ideas are expressed principally through visuals. D.J. Henry recognized the differences between today’s learners and learners of yesteryear, and wrote Writing for Life from the ground up to address the thinking and learning processes occurring today.
 
The ground-breaking design of Writing for Life (developed in conjunction with Dorling Kindersley Publishers [DK]) makes writing, reading and thinking processes visible, and shows the processes rather than just telling students about them. Highly graphic layouts and unique visual pedagogy empower students to transfer the learning strategies they already use in interpreting the visual world to the task of writing. This visual approach—created specifically for today’s visually-oriented learners-is complemented by the student-centered learning strategy called “What’s the Point?” Not only does "What's the Point?" demonstrate real-world scenarios or applications of writing in context, but this directed thinking activity also prompts students to set a learning goal, call on prior knowledge, predict information, focus on structure, and generate details for each writing lesson. Thus, the visual approach and the “What's the Point?” theme of Writing for Life inspire student-centered learning and motivation by illustrating the power of writing in life.
 
This edition of Writing for Life: Paragraphs and Essays is supported by an enhanced MyWritingLab course, which offers text-specific exercises within the Learning Path, all of which feed into the MyWritingLab Gradebook.
