Over his long and distinguished teaching career, whenever Edgar Roberts taught literature and composition he dedicated a substantial amount of his class time to explaining to students how they should go about effectively completing their writing assignments. He found that, the more time he spent demonstrating how to write clearly, strategically, and persuasively about literary works, the better the students’ final essays were. Over the years, he tried and tested hundreds of assignments on hundreds of literary works in his own classes and came up with many valuable suggestions for how to improve students’ ability to write about literature. To enable him to share his experience and his successful teaching strategies, Professor Roberts attempted to create his ideal resource for literature and composition classrooms; it had to include both a rich anthology of diverse classic and contemporary works and a thorough, practical presentation of writing skills and strategies to use in analyzing these works.

Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, Compact Sixth Edition is founded on these principles of writing about literature. First, students should learn how to engage deeply and critically with a broad selection of stories, poems, and plays. Second, the writing process must be carefully and thoroughly integrated into the presentation of all literary genres, elements, and major writers throughout the entire text, not relegated to a single separate chapter or appendix. Complete coverage of writing about each literary element, “casebooks” that allow for deeper exploration of important writers in each genre, and a total of 53 exemplary student essays and paragraphs with accompanying commentary ensure that students gain a thorough comprehension of the conventions, strategies, and organizational patterns to allow them to think critically about literature and to produce thoughtful and compelling essays, paragraphs, documented research papers, and examination responses.