Common Places represents a cohesive instructional framework to accelerate college readiness. Teaching reading and writing together requires more than just combining separate reading and writing pedagogies. This innovative text helps students read from a writer's point of view and write with an imagined reader ever present. Students are challenged to develop their abilities by engaging in real-world projects, thus acquiring the literacy skills they need to pass challenging college-level courses.

In addition to accelerating instruction, the pedagogy embeds content designed to foster the emotional intelligence development, metacognition, and problem-solving skills students often lack, yet which are correlated with higher grade point averages and a greater capacity to learn.

Purpose-oriented projects keep students interested and motivated. The handbook puts a strong emphasis on sentence combining and grammar in context.