Thoughtful Writing, through its advice and through its muscle-memory-developing exercises, teaches students how to succeed at any kind of investigative or argumentative writing. Its training in how to find and use telling details solves the mystifying problem of how to write enough words to fill your required number of pages.

This text demonstrates how to move from facts to inferences to a thesis and helps you write thesis statements that are genuinely thoughtful. It helps give warmth and life to your writing by making you conscious that you are writing for readers that you respect. It very specifically shows you how to conduct research - how to learn from people, from books, and from the vast resources on the internet.

Its chapters on organizing, paragraphing, revising, and punctuating help you achieve professional standards of presentation. It teaches English grammar in a more enjoyable and useful way than does any other writing textbook.

All in all, it helps you produce writing that is, in both the humane and the intellectual senses of the term, genuinely thoughtful.