My new book, TL;DR: A Very Brief Guide to Reading & Writing in University (out August 1st, 2023, from the On Campus imprint of UBC Press) had its genesis in the sudden shift to online instruction in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was teaching SFU's first-year writing course, Foundations of Academic Literacy, and I didn’t want to force my students to buy a textbook because some of them couldn’t even leave their home countries, let alone make a trip to our bookstore. I tried to strip my class down to its bare essentials, but I found there were still things I wanted to explain to students in ways that didn’t work very well over a Zoom lecture. So, I set out to write the world’s shortest writing textbook! My goal was to write in a direct, no-nonsense, friendly, informal way, and to be honest about what I see as important for succeeding in first-year writing courses and the early stages of undergraduate programs in general.

"TL;DR" ("too long; didn't read") is something people write on the internet when they run into a giant block of text that looks long and boring. And to a first-year university student, "a giant block of text that looks long and boring” describes what textbooks can feel like sometimes. TL;DR therefore clocks in at a brisk 150 pages. Each chapter is an average of only 4 pages, but it’s packed with advice on everything from grammar and citation style to introductions and conclusions to developing research questions and finding credible sources.

More from UBC Press here: https://www.ubcpress.ca/tldr