This brief rhetoric focuses on the key strategies that any academic writer needs to know -- summary, synthesis, analysis, and critique.Building off of the hallmark writing instruction of the best-selling Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum, this writing guide focuses on the critical reading and writing strategies that students need in order to thoughtfully interpret and incorporate source material into their own papers. The text employs high-interest readings from a range of disciplines to allow students to practice these strategies and skills, while numerous student papers model the kinds of academic texts that students are expected to produce.