A Short Guide to College Writing

Sylvan Barnet was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Erasmus Hall High School, New York University (BA), and Harvard University(MA, PhD). For a while he was a

semiprofessional magician, but whenhe found that he could fool all of the people all of the time the work became boring, and so he became a college professor. He taught composition and

English literature at Tufts University for thirty years, published scholarly articles on Shakespeare, and is the author and coauthor of several books about the art of writing.

Pat Bellanca was born in East Hanover, New Jersey; she holds degrees in English from Wellesley College (BA) and Rutgers University (MA, PhD). She teaches in the Harvard College Writing

Program and is Director of Writing Programs at the Harvard Extension School, the university’s open-enrollment evening division. Her research interests include composition studies and Gothic fiction,

fields that are not unrelated.

Marcia Stubbs was born in Newark, New Jersey, where she was drum majorette ofWeequahic High School’s band, and she was educated at Stanford University and the University

of Michigan. She has taught at Tufts University, Harvard University,and Wellesley College, where she has directed the Writing Program. In addition to annotations on students’

compositions, she has written poems and verse translations, and she is the coauthor of several books on writing.