"College Writing Skills" offers students a practical guide to becoming better writers. From mastering the traditional five-paragraph essay and its variations to learning about the finer points of grammar and punctuation, "College Writing Skills" empowers students to take control of their writing and put it to work for them. Now, with the new online writing program Connect Writing and the soon-to-come Connect Langan, an online interactive version of "College Writing Skills", this new eighth edition brings writing closer to students and helps to take them where they need to go. Whether online or in class, "College Writing Skills" offers students the tools to succeed.

John Langan has taught reading and writing at Atlantic Cape Com-munity College near Atlantic City, New Jersey, for over twenty-five years. The author of a popular series of college textbooks on both writing and reading, John enjoys the challenge of developing materials that teach skills in an especially clear and lively way. Before teaching,he earned advanced degrees in writing at Rutgers University and in reading at Rowan University. He also spent a year writing fiction that,he says, "is now at the back of a drawer waiting to be discovered and acclaimed posthumously." While in school, he supported himself by working as a truck driver, a machinist, a battery assembler, a hospital attendant, and an apple packer. John now lives with his wife, Judith Nadell, near Philadelphia. In addition to his wife and Philly sports teams, his passions include reading and turning on nonreaders to the pleasure and power of books. Through Townsend Press, his educational publishing company, he has developed the nonprofit "Townsend Library"--a collection of more than thirty new and classic stories that appeal to readers of any age.