This clear, reader-friendly book is carefully designed to help readers gain confidence and acquire competence in their academic writing abilities. It focuses on real people as they write and actively involves readers in the writing process. The authors' innovative approach encourages reflection on how professional writing initiatives connect to the personal self. For pre-service and in-service teachers, graduate students, school administrators, educational specialists, and all others involved in the educational enterprise, effective writing is important to professional success. Organized to help the reader move progressively and confidently forward as a writer of academic prose, this book features: (1) activities to engage readers in connecting their writing endeavors to their personal selves, and in discovering their own writing attitudes, behaviors, strengths, and problem areas; (2) practical applications to inform and support the reader's writing initiatives--including opportunities to engage in invention strategies, to begin a draft, to revise and edit a piece of writing that is personally and professionally important, and to record reflections about writing; (3) the voices of the authors and of graduate students who are pursuing a variety of academic writing tasks--to serve as models for the reader's writing endeavors; and (4) writing samples and personal stories about writing shared by experts in various contexts--offering hints about conditions, self-reflections, and habits that help them write effectively. All students and professionals in the field of education will welcome the distinctive focus in this book on connecting the personal and the professional, and the wealth of practical applications and opportunities for reflection it provides. Following a foreword by D. M. Murray, and a preface, this book is organized into the seven chapters: (1) Seeing Ourselves as Writers: A Process of Personal Discovery; (2) Types and Purposes of Academic Writing; (3) Invention; (4) Drafting; (5) Revision: The Heart of Writing; (6) Editing; and (7) Integrating the Personal and the Professional.