""Make Straight Your Arrow: Student Writing, Critical Thinking, and General Semantics "addresses the difficulties students experience in thinking clearly and writing precisely and expressively It teaches students to pay attention to their own critical thinking processes and to the language involved in both careful thinking and effective writing.
The book establishes a foundation of general semantic principles and offers a series of assignments encouraging students to discover the benefits that operational prose can bring to their thinking and writing. Early assignments ask students to describe, summarize, and report; later assignments ask students to analyze and refute others arguments. At the end of each assignment-sequence, students offer their own arguments about moral and practical questions. Students also receive training in integrating source material with their own arguments. The graduated series of assignments makes the text suitable for writing classes at all levels.
With its emphasis on helping students meet the real challenges they face in writing and critical thinking, "Make Straight Your Arrow "successfully leads student-writers from incoherence to coherence and gives them communication skills for use in the classroom and beyond.
Tim Lyons holds an M.A. in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. Currently he is an instructor in the writing and rhetoric program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Professor Lyons has taught courses in introductory writing, writing on science and society, and fiction, ethics, and gender. He has written for "ETC: A Review of General Semantics "and "Vocabula."""