About The Author

Pat Nurse has been working at The City College of New York for the past ten years. For the past four years she has been teaching English composition, and research papers at LaGuardia Community College.

Ms. Nurse thinks that a proper essay or research paper does not apply only to English courses.  History, Science, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and other writing courses demand take-home essays or research papers.  Therefore, it is important to present information in a well-organized manner.  Journalists, presidents, chairs and other speakers can implement these methods.

The methods in this book serve as guidelines for every writing course.  This book can be used from high school to college (even when presenting a thesis or dissertation).  The techniques should always be revisited to ensure that college papers retain a high standard.

Iembarked upon this   “How to write…?” book because the methods helped my students.

   The inspiration for this book came about after I started teaching incoming college students composition writing.  I was moved when students were not able to implement the traditional layout of expository composition.

   Many students were aware that an essay is composed of an introduction, a body, and a conclusion, yet they were not familiar with theses, topic sentences, middle sentences, closing sentences, or how to arrive at them.  The students were not able to complete essays with confidence.

   I then felt it was necessary to devise a more direct approach to make students understand the components of a winning essay.  The results are lodged in the pages of this “How to Write…” textbook.
  
   The contents of this book have been tested for four semesters in eight classes.  There has been a 95% improvement in the standard of essay writing and research papers, and an average of more than 80% of students passing the ACT retest (American College Test).