The first in a series of two full-color worktexts for the developmental writing market, Discovery focuses on helping students build sentence and paragraph writing skills.

With its encouraging tone, careful explanations, and abundance of carefully sequenced and incrementally challenging exercise sets, it enables students to view writing as a means of discovering more about themselves and their surroundings.

The book starts with an overview of the writing process and special attention is given to prewriting and the development of topic and supporting sentences to help students put grammar correctness in the context of writing. Parts 2 through 5 provide lucid and well illustrated explanations of basic sentence elements, grammar, punctuation, and mechanics. Part 6 is a section of student and professional reading selections, which includes an introduction on critical reading and comprehension and contains numerous writing exercises. An appendix provides practical advice for ESL writers studying English grammar and writing.

In every chapter, Discovery offers a progression of Exploration exercises that begin with comprehension and practice of fundamental concepts (a and b). The next level (c) focuses on invention and the writing of short pieces. Students then proceed to Challenge exercises that call for critical thinking, drafting, and revision. Grammar, mechanics, and punctuation chapters conclude with summary exercises that call upon students to use all the grammar and sentence skills learned in the chapter.

In addition, four of the text's five parts conclude with Discovering Connections, a set of paragraph writing assignments designed to encourage creativity and critical thinking. Discovering Connections exercises also conclude each chapter in Part 1.