The new edition of The Curious Researcher tackles the revolutionary challenge posed by generative AI, helping students to exploit the promise of technology like ChatGPT while avoiding its potential to take over their work. The book's emphasis on research as personal discovery and its focus on exploratory research is more timely than ever. ChatGPT simply can't write the kinds of research essays The Curious Researcher promotes. The latest edition introduces new content on how to enlist AI as a writing assistant, and it prompts students to actively reflect on the ethics of exploiting a technology that can act like a writer. Throughout the book, the authors present their own reflections on this in a recurring feature, "An Eye on AI," and they encourage students to reflect along with them. Features that have made The Curious Researcher a best-seller remain, including its personal voice and thorough coverage of academic conventions. The 10th edition of The Curious Researcher represents one of the most dramatic revisions yet for a time when we are rethinking writing instruction in the age of AI.

COMING SOON

The 2022 edition of The Curious Writer features the same personal style that has appealed to students since the first edition, but now it includes two new co-authors – Kelly Myers and Michelle Payne. Both Kelly and Michelle bring their expertise in argument, reflective writing, and digital media to the sixth edition. As Always, The Curious Writer uses students’ own interests to engage them in writing in a range of genres. In the process, they experience the power of writing as a source of discovery.

With the first edition in 1994, The Curious Researcher upended ideas about how to teach researched writing. Now in its 9th edition, the book is a classic. Its emphasis on inquiry, exploration, and curiosity have inspired generations of students to see research as an opportunity for discovery. The text itself, written in a personal style, models the ways that research writing can be lively and interesting while academically informed. Organized around a five-week research project, The Curious Writer is well-suited to online instruction. A new edition will be released in 2024 that focuses on how to use AI in the research process.

The Curious Reader, co-authored with Michelle Payne, is a perfect complement to the other texts in the Curious series. The book begins by encouraging students to explore their own reading habits, and understand how to read for inquiry-based projects. A range of readings from across the disciplines demonstrate the wide range of research writing, including the personal academic essay and ethnographic essay, and helps students read more formal academic papers. It ends with a research project on the ethics of publishing disturbing photographs.

Beginning to advanced creative nonfiction students can quickly access a wide range of excerpts that demonstrate key elements of craft, including scene, description, structure, reflection, and style. Additional content explores the ethics of truth telling, the evolution of nonfiction narrative, and the features of three forms of creative nonfiction: essay, literary journalism, and memoir. Focused on the analysis of key excerpts from landmark works of creative nonfiction, the book uses these as springboards of discussion and writing. See my Resources page for tools and tips on how to work with this bok

Writers are invited to wander for forty days discovering the richness and surprise that their own writing can yield. Co-authored with Barry Lane, Discovering the Writer Within leads readers on forty days of exercises that helps them understand writing in new ways. The authors write along with them. In print since 1989, the book has inspired generations of writers.

Why is the research paper so troubling for teachers and students? Beyond Note Cards: Rethinking the Freshman Research Paper finds some of the research paper’s problems in its history, and argues for a new approach – the research essay that makes exploration and discovery the motive for the research. The book provides the theories that are the foundation for the texts in the Curious series.

This is my first book, it is a lively collection of essays related to the American lobster. Divided into four sections, the book tells the story of the author’s journey up the East coast eating lobsters, and examines the industry, science, culture, and culinary traditions that surround this fascinating and delectable creature. Though now out of print, the Lobster Almanac is still available from some online book sellers