This student-friendly Sixth Edition of Composing with Confidence focuses on the writing of paragraphs and essays within the composing process.

Students are guided step-by-step through the composing process, but are provided with options in prewriting, discovery, outlining, and predicting. Each chapter in the unit on the rhetorical modes offers student model paragraphs and essays, as well as professional models. Each chapter in this unit includes a well-wrought paragraph assignment, an optional essay writing assignment, and at least five alternative assignments—several of them in response to readings—to allow for maximum instructional flexibility.

Original contributions from well-known authors, textbook writers, professors, and editors offer students advice and insights into the composing practices of professionals. And a full unit of fifteen readings from professional as well as student writers establishes the reading/writing connection, while providing students with additional models and prompts for writing.

A full unit on sentence-level issues of grammar and mechanics offers students instruction in only those skills that they need to master to make their writing clear and grammatically correct. Each chapter in the unit ends with two "Editing for Mastery" exercises, in which students must find and correct errors in extended prose passage. The answers to the first exercise are provided in an appendix. "Tips" boxes and "If Your First Language Is Not English" boxes also provide short, specific, and practical advice to students.

Above all, however, Composing with Confidence retains its most popular feature: fast-paced, high-interest, continuous discourse materials that make the book fun to read and work with.