Thanks, Acknowledgements, and Attribution

Thanks and Acknowledgments

We began this project to provide our students and colleagues a high-quality, zero-cost alternative to well-liked but expensive publishing company textbooks like They Say / I Say for use in first-year writing courses at the University of Oregon. We – the authors, Kara Clevinger and Stephen Rust – hope the project carries forward the University of Oregon’s proud tradition of first-year writing for a new generation. We are particularly indebted to the scholarly works of UO faculty members John Gage, including The Shape of Reason (1986) and James Crosswhite, including Reading, Reasoning, and Writing (2015), and the mentorship of former program directors Anne Laskaya and Carolyn Bergquist.

The scholarly field of Composition and Rhetoric studies remains rife with debate over what counts as “good writing” in college, who gets to decide what counts as “good writing” in college, and how much agency students and teachers should each have in those decisions.  While we follow these arguments and current research in the field attentively and they inform many aspects of this project, please keep in mind that this project is a learning resource and not a research monograph, so citations have necessarily been kept to a minimum to focus readers’ attention on the task at hand – gaining the foundational skills to write with curiosity, precision, rigor, and charm and developing the self-efficacy to tackle any writing task in college with success.

The project was funded by a University of Oregon Knight Libraries Digital Scholarship Award. Our thanks to Director of Digital Scholarship Services Franny Gaede and Open Educational Resources Librarian Rayne Vieger for their commitment to our project and for providing intellectual, technical, and fair use advice and organizational support.  Our thanks also to the 2020-2021 UO Composition program administrators, Spike Gildea, Nick Recktenwald, and Emily Simnitt for supporting our digital scholarship award application and every step of the project. And a huge thank you to Ryan Davies for a keen eye in helping us edit and polish this resource.

Our project includes approximately 50+% original writing and a blend of creative commons Open Educational Resources.  The principal source of upcycled creative commons licensed material is the open-access resource, Writing for Success published by the University of Minnesota.  Our thanks to Nick Recktenwald for co-writing Chapters 2a, 2b, and 3b, Sarah Preston for contributing the rhetorical précis template for “Summarizing Sources” in 2b, Eleanor Wakefield for contributing the “Organizing a Counterargument” table in 4c, and June Manuel for sharing a handout on ethos, logos, and pathos adapted for the “Reasoning” section of Chapter 4c. All images inserted throughout the text come from public domain sources or are used under fair use guidelines with contexts transformed for educational purposes. The authors have conducted a fair use analysis for all images/figures and text adapted for this resource, guided by the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources.

The Preface includes information on audience, tone, and purpose adapted from Chapter 6 of Writing for Success and large portions of Chapters 3c, 4, and 5 are adapted from Chapters 8 and 9 of Writing for Success by University of Minnesota, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The six types of stasis questions identified in Chapter 3b are adapted from pages xviii-xix of “Reading, Reasoning, and Writing about Science,” by James Crosswhite published with the author’s permission in The Culture of Science, 2nd Edition (2019) by University of Oregon Composition Program, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.  The Transitions section of Chapter 5b is used courtesy of the University of North Carolina Writing Center from the handout “Transitions” (with minor changes approved), which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. The Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources section of Chapter 3c, is adapted from the guide “Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources”, which is licensed by University of Virginia Libraries under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Writing as Inquiry by Kara Clevinger and Stephen Rust published by University Oregon Libraries is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) 4.0 International License.