Adventures in Composition: Improving Writing Skills through Literature

Adventures in Composition is designed to help students develop their academic and paragraph writing skills through the examination of short stories of some well-known writers. These stories will hold the students’ interest as they explore writing from a new perspective— learning to use the work of good writers as a guide. The types of writing featured and taught are narrative, description, comparison and contrast, and expository. Each chapter features a Writing Basics section (e.g., compound sentences, subject-verb agreement, transitions) and pre-writing activities (e.g., outlining) followed by three writing assignments. Students learn the features of each type of writing and have many opportunities to practice and develop their reading and writing skills. Peer evaluation and editing are strongly encouraged.  Adventures in Composition includes the work of Guy de Maupassant, O. Henry, Shirley Jackson, Katherine Mansfield, W. Somerset Maugham, William Saroyan, and Oscar Wilde.