Designed for instructors who prefer to teach composition with a separate handbook or some other combination of texts, this brief edition of The Longman Writer, Fifth Edition , contains everything from the very popular full edition except the Handbook.

Students get a rhetoric, reader, and research guide as well as plentiful exercises—all in a shorter and more economical volume.

Created by the authors of the best-selling The Macmillan Reader, the text draws on more than 60 years of combined teaching experience to integrate the best of the "product" and "process" approaches to writing. Its particular strengths include an emphasis on the reading-writing connection, a focus on invention and revision, more attention to the fact that patterns blend in actual writing, and an abundance of class-tested activities and assignments—more than 300 in all.