For Introduction to Literature courses and Freshman Composition courses that emphasize writing about literature.   When Edgar Roberts taught literature and composition many years ago, a large part of his course work involved essay writing assignments.  He would dedicate a substantial amount of his class time explaining how the students should prepare their writing assignments and he discovered that the more he described to his students what he wanted, and the longer he explained things, the better the final essays turned out to be.  However, giving his students such explicit essay-writing directions was taking up too much of his classroom time.  At that point, Professor Roberts started to write and hand out directions, thus saving him valuable classroom time. Over the years, he tried and tested each assignment in his own classes.  In addition to writing coverage, Professor Roberts recognized that literature classrooms needed both writing about literature instruction and an anthology to meet the needs of the literature and composition course.  Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, Compact Edition is founded on the principles of writing about literature.  It is not an afterthought and it is not treated as a separate chapter or appendix; but rather, it is the carefully integrated philosophy of Professor Roberts’ approach to teaching literature and composition.    Complete coverage of writing about each element and a total of 23 student essays with accompanying commentary ensure student comprehension of writing about literature and therefore, produce better student papers.